July 25, 1987 | Just when you thought it was safe to enter a moviehouse, after the unleashing of Jaws: The Revenge, along comes an even shoddier second-rate sequel. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, a confused and cheap-looking movie that evidently was butchered in the editing room, would be better titled Superman Farce: The Search for a Quick Buck.
Christopher Reeve, once again decked out in the blue tights of the Man of Steel, does his best to maintain a straight face, and a fair degree of enthusiasm, despite the rampant tackiness. But even his attractive sincerity is severely undercut by the chintzy special effects (courtesy of Cannon Pictures, the penny-pinching outfit responsible for this sequel) and the jumbled, slapdash storyline.
Reeve provided the not-half-bad original idea for the screenplay by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal: Superman, touched by a letter from a schoolboy fearful of World War III, tries to remove all nuclear weapons from Earth. Unfortunately, arch-villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) is able to clone the Man of Steel to create Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), a super-inhuman bent on Superman’s destruction. Even more unfortunately, this potentially interesting plot is frittered away on a clunky, uninspired B-movie.
There’s also a subplot involving the purchase of The Daily Planet by a Rupert Murdoch-like mogul (Sam Wanamaker). Mariel Hemingway plays the mogul’s leggy daughter, a publisher who sets her eye on reporter Clark Kent, Superman’s mild-mannered alter ego. Evidently, she hires British headline writers: At one point, the front page of The Daily Planet reads: “A New Publisher For Your Favourite Newspaper.”
Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File, Lady Sings the Blues) is credited as director, but it seems likely someone else — quite possibly, someone who doesn’t like Furie very much — hacked away at Superman IV during post-production. The story has a jerky start-and-stop quality, lurching from incident to incident without developing concepts or characters. The gaps in continuity are most obvious in the later scenes, especially when, after Superman is wounded in a battle with Nuclear Man, Clark Kent suddenly appears to be in the latter stages of AIDS.
This is typical of Superman IV, a movie that reeks of the careless and the slipshod. Even the flying scenes look phony, the kiss of death for this type of fantasy-adventure. Mark Pillow snarls a great deal as Nuclear Man, and blows up the Great Wall of China. Superman just looks at the rubble, and it magically reassembles. Now, I know Superman has x-ray vision, and heat vision, but this is the first time I’ve known him to have construction vision.
Gene Hackman, who wasn’t missed in Superman III, makes Lex Luthor as obnoxiously cartoonish as he was in the first two Superman films. Also back again are Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Jackie Cooper as Perry White and Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen. They need not have bothered.
