SUPERMAN III (1983) What is it about part 3's? I liked this movie as a kid, though I always understood that it wasn't in the league of the first two films. But I haven't seen it since then, and when it came on TNN, I figured I'd give it another look. I also caught the second half of the hilariously bad Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, which I'd seen before (the second half, that is - I've never seen the first half. I can't wait to see the whole thing.). Now I know what "Time Compressed" means. It means that a lot of shots are sped up but the dialogue is played at normal speed, though the silences between lines are seemingly trimmed to make up for the space. I can see Ted now: "Timing, schmiming! If we do this to all the movies, we can show Roadhouse twice today!" This is no way to watch a movie. So, I viewed this for the first time as an adult, and...it's bad. A lot of it is really, really, REALLY bad. But it reminded me of just how good a Superman Christopher Reeve was. I'm not sure I would've supported how he played Clark Kent, but he did that really well too. If the fourth movie wasn't even worse than this one, I might've looked forward even to an old-n'-gray Superman, doing battle with a Lex Luthor who laughs at the male pattern baldness all his friends have to deal with. Clark is invited back to Smallville for his high school reunion, which he proposes to write up into some insipid human interest piece. And who lives in Smallville? That's right baby, it's Lana Lang, rgggellle! She's played by Annette O'Toole, who, oddly enough, is playing Clark's adoptive mother in a TV series about Superman now (seen three episodes; great cast, not-bad writing, every plot is exactly the same). Margot Kidder as Lois Lane only shows up briefly at the beginning and end. Meanwhile, a complete loser played by Richard Pryor runs out of unemployment benefits and decides to go to school to learn computer programming. He becomes the world's greatest computer programmer seemingly overnight, tries embezzling his boss (Robert Vaughn), and is then blackmailed by that boss into hijacking a weather satellite in order to create a hurricane in Columbia, part of some great coffee scheme. (I went to the bathroom during this part, remembering most of this tedious scene from when I saw it as a kid, but something tells me he had to "reverse the polarity" on something.) But why stop at the weather, of course? The plot of this movie is extremely silly throughout; sometimes, that can be the charm of a movie like this, but I found the lonely, dead-serious moments to be like oases. Like Superman finding one person in a chemical plant fire who has good reasons not to leave, or later, Clark Kent clawing to escape from the jaws of a trash compactor (disturbing!). The "serious" moment I remembered the best started out well, but went downhill fast once the woman who got borg-ified by "the ultimate computer" started shooting laser beams out of her hands. This "ultimate computer" is designed by Pryor's computer genius. Just what this computer is supposed to do, he never says, only that it's more powerful than any computer in the world (circa 1983, wow). Vaughn's billionaire builds it, and adds in numerous missile-firing defense mechanisms, disguised to look like the canyon floor (why did he bother designing them to blend in when he planned to use them the day it was unveiled?). The resulting missile-defense-system-vs.-Superman battle is largely played out on a computer monitor with video-game sound effects and an accumulating score for near-hits. This was apparently a plug for a then-planned video game which never worked out; regardless, it's spectacularly bad comedy. Another defense the computer implements is to trap Superman inside a big bubble. One of the villains says something to the effect of "Let's see how long Superman can last without air!" Superman, of course, flies around in outer space frequently and obviously can last quite some time. You'd never know it from this scene, though. (Superman IV is like a gold mine of really terrible outer-space stuff, like humans being flown into outer space without a suit, Superman gasping for air on the surface of the moon, the villain bellowing loudly on the surface of the moon...) With that early-80's conviction that computers can probably do freakin' anything, one computer is assigned to synthesize a piece of Kryptonite. This happens to be red Kryptonite. There were a whole bunch of different kinds of Kryptonite in the comics, but I don't remember what any of 'em do. This one makes Superman evil. What does Evil Superman do? He does really naughty stuff, like getting drunk and blowing out the Olympic torch so that the run has to be started over again. Ooooh, Evil! Later on, he's convinced to rip a hole in the side of an oil tanker. As he's flying towards the tanker, you can see him having an attack of conscience, as if thinking "What am I thinking? I can't move against the oil industry! They'll crush me like a bug!" Ultimately, this results in a battle of Good Superman vs. Evil Superman. Now, this is a really cool battle, for the most part, and is the best uninterrupted sequence in the movie. Reeve makes a surprisingly good Evil Superman, though I have to admit some of the decisions about this are a little baffling (Evil Superman has stubble? What would Superman shave with, considering that nothing damages his hair?). It's conclusion, though, is even more baffling than that, leaving me wondering, "Was that, like, a metaphor?" The script by David and Leslie Newman keeps finding new ways to baffle. Before he turns Evil, Superman of course spends much of his time saving people from various calamities, like a fire at a chemical plant. It's not enough that he rescues people; he has to do it in style! Like when several people are trapped on the roof. Somebody in the crowd actually says "What's he going to do, fly them down one at a time?" Really, he could've done that, but instead, he elects to rip off a giant smokestack and have them slide down. The chemical plant won't be thanking him for what he did to their smokestack. He could also probably have put out the fire with his breath (after all, he does clean up all the damage from a hurricane with heat rays from his eyes). Instead, he freezes the top layer of a nearby lake and...yeah. You can tell these things aren't much of a challenge for him anymore. So, when he's not saving the world (or individuals), Superman is reduced to having to attend a little boy's birthday party, because he told all his friends that Superman would be coming. Tip to Lana Lang: there's an easier solution to this than trying to get Superman to come. Let the kid figure out the hard way that there are consequences to this kind of behavior; then see if it's ever repeated. The acting is largely better than this movie deserves. Clark Kent, as played by Reeve, is not just a "mild-mannered reporter", but a bumbling goof, with nothing in the way of social skills. But he must have those skills, seeing as he uses them as Superman. One wonders, in this most wild of Superman/Kent dichotomies, just how he behaves when he's hangin' out in his Fortress Of Solitude. O'Toole is impossibly charming as Lang; maybe a little TOO charming, like an overcorrection on Kidder's famously abrasive Lois Lane, dammit, I just wanted to hug her. It's sad to note that the script doesn't seem to think that small-town life offers anything more than picnics and home cooking (check out those yokel coal miners), but O'Toole does a great job with what she's given, and her scenes with Reeve demonstrate a lot of chemistry, certainly more than Reeve ever had with Kidder. I kept thinking throughout that eventually, her envy of Metropolitans would give way when she figured out that picnics and home cooking isn't so bad, but no, she goes to Metropolis without the slightest whiff of doubt, and presumably lives happily ever after. Vaughn has some fun as the villain (lots of speeches about how rich he is), and Annie Ross is amusingly icy as his sister. Many might find her annoying but I really liked Pamela Stephenson as Vaughn's "personal trainer" (wink, nudge); she's portrayed as a perfectly intelligent lady who, for whatever reason, sees fit to play the part of a complete airhead in front of the others. Pryor is definitely the weak link here, though. Obviously, Pryor's a funny guy, but he sure ain't funny here. There's no two ways about it; the character he's playing here is a complete and total loser, right up until his last scene where he basically just repeats the behavior of his first. (I'm reminded of Michael Moriarty in Q, but then, I think "Come back, Q! All is forgiven!") Sometimes, he's just hard to watch, like that first scene in the unemployment line. Later on, when he asks Vaughan to build him the mega-computer he's designed...do you believe even for a moment that this guy has any clue as to what this computer is, what it can or can't do? I don't, partly because of Pryor, partly because the script is every bit as clueless. He's just wildly miscast. Odd, that the funniest scene in this movie (the elaborate introductory slapstick sequence, with a slightly disturbing conclusion) doesn't feature him. Superman III has some local affection for it because it's one of the biggest movies to be filmed here in Calgary (much of it was also filmed in the surrounding towns and countryside). That affection usually dries up once the movie is actually seen - and unlike other movies filmed here in town, I swear I can't identify a single definite location. Just as Superman exists in a world that constantly seems on the brink of melting down entirely, Reeve here struggles mightily among the awfulness of the movie around him. Unlike Superman, though, he doesn't triumph in the end and make everything right. This is one bad movie. Directed by Richard Lester, who I've always thought of as being like Richard Donner (who directed the first two), but crappier. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE