Review of Superman III (1983) by Carolynne R — 23 Jun 2009

There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- to recommend this movie. After creating a successful franchise featuring America's most beloved superhero, Alexander and Ilya Salkind concluded that what Americans really wanted was an inoffensive Richard Pryor movie that also happened to feature Superman. Just imagine-- it's THE TOY, but with Superman instead of a rich kid.

Robert Vaughn replaces Gene Hackman as the megalomaniacal bad guy, and I guess if I had to say something nice about the movie, it would be that he does a decent job as a silly comic book villain. I guess. Superman turns evil for a while, but it turns out evil Superman is just a guy who doesn't risk his life to save others and likes to get drunk and have sex with women, which means that evil Superman is pretty much... me. It might have been amusing if evil Superman had done something truly evil, like hit a kid or use his heat vision to cook a kitten, but no. All this guy did was refuse to shower.

Oh, and I said in my comments about the original SUPERMAN movie that Lex Luthor's plan was dumb. I misspoke. THIS villain's plan is dumb. It turns out, in the end, that the big plan is to build a massive supercomputer that... does stuff. What kinda stuff? Any stuff-- they don't really give examples, though. Now, to be fair, this is a credible threat, given the logic of the movie-- earlier, we learned that computers can synthesize Kryptonite and control the weather. But if you can synthesize Kryptonite and control the weather... what else do you need your computer to be able to do?