I hope you don’t expect me to save you, cause I don’t do that anymore

Superman III

Oh, lord, Superman III. You know, the second Superman movie (or the theatrical version of it anyway) had its share of problems due to the replacing of Donner with Lester, and so it’s no surprise that this film, now with no Donner input whatsoever, is a complete disaster. However, I want to say right now that it’s not really Lester’s fault. Lester was placed in the job because he was a good friend of the producers and would play ball with whatever they wanted, and they wanted camp trash. As long as it brought in the green, they didn’t care how much they wrecked up the place, and wreck it up they did. Alexander Salkind does a commentary track on the recent DVD release and his defense of the movie is, exclusively, its box-office take. That it made money is all that matters, and thus it was a success. Sure, people went to it. The first film was great and the second had a lot to recommend it. Gauge success of the third film by how many people stayed with the franchise after seeing it. Well, not many bothered with the fourth. Everyone was burned by the third film, DC Comics included. This set their image back considerably to the Mort Weisinger-era Superman childish nonsense stories of the late fifties/early sixties, but with none of the ludicrous charm and all of the overwriting and disregard to the characters. How do you so thoroughly ruin a franchise?

Well, for starters, as I mentioned, Dick Lester is not really to blame. The guy’s not a bad director, he did a great job with A Hard Day’s Night, and has a knack for slapstick. A superhero film was not his element. So he didn’t make one. This is more of a Richard Pryor comedy.

Richard Pryor plays August (Gus) Gorman. The movie opens with him in line at the welfare office, as he’s cut off welfare for lack of success at finding a job after a long time. His conversation with the clerk gives an indication that he is completely incapable of picking up new concepts and is unemployable, and since him being a genius is the centre of the whole movie, we’re already in problem territory. Borrowing a match from someone, he sees an advertisement for a career in computers. Ah-ha! Computers! That’s the ticket for someone with no skills or aptitude for learning new things!

Anyway, screw that whole story thing, because it’s time for an extended, completely extraneous slapstick sequence which features one of Lester’s favourite thing, people falling over while talking in a telephone booth and – ha ha – continuing to talk in the fallen-over booth! It’s so funny he did it in both Superman II and III! I’m holding my sides! Of course, the whole thing starts as a chain reaction of guys looking at a pretty girl. Good lord, when was this made? This whole thing is a carefully constructed display of the idiot world we are viewing, a place where the rules of logic and linear thought do not and can not apply. This includes police shooting randomly into crowds of people and traffic after a single robber with a bag of money. They shoot out a car’s tires because they’re not aiming at anything in particular and it crashes into a fire hydrant, and so, of course, the car starts filling up with water and the guy inside is drowning until Superman appears to pull him out of the sunroof. Slick. Oh yeah, and Superman gets changed in a photo booth while it’s in operation, so it gets pictures of him changing from Clark Kent to Superman. Remember the subtle gag of Clark looking at the phone stall back in the first movie? Well, all subtlety is gone now. They may as well have made the entire film’s soundtrack “Yakety Sax” and had Benny Hill play Superman.

Anyway, after this sequence, apparently that same morning (although the movie is kind of poorly edited and really there’s no sense of passage of time at any point), Gus Gorman is now a computer programmer at some nondescript firm that has no discernible purpose apart from having computer terminals (are they a coffee manufacturer? There’s a thing about coffee later, but then why all the computers? Whatever, right, it’s in the script, this is an idiot world, the audience doesn’t need to know and nobody who wrote it gave a crap). Anyway, just as the boss-type person explains to another employee that something is impossible, Gus makes it happen, because he is, you see, a computer genius, a total wizard in the ways of computers. As far as I can tell, he was supposed to be Brainiac, but since that would require some sort of usage of Superman and comic book stuff, it never really came to be. Gus comes up with that same fraction of a cent-shaving scheme that they later used in Office Space, and with the same result as way more money than he expected ends up in his account.

Meanwhile, at the Daily Planet, there’s an inane subplot about Perry White drawing numbers out of a Bingo roller and awarding trips to South America. Also, Lois Lane leaves for Bermuda because Margot Kidder was every bit as disgusted by this movie as I am. Clark Kent is going back to Smallville for his high school reunion, and he’s going to write a story on it. Why the devil Jimmy Olsen is going with Clark to his high school reunion is not entirely clear, but there they are, on the bus to Smallville together, when they pass a chemical plant on fire. Jimmy spouts off ‘Danger? Goes with the territory, Mr. Kent!’ Thanks, boy reporter. Anyway, the flying effects are kind of poor, not as bad as they would get with the zero-budget next film, but really phoned-in, stiff and always at dead 45 degree angles because anything more would have taken time and effort and those things cost money when they were more interested in just getting more. Superman saves some people and Jimmy is injured and his camera gets melted. None of it has to do with anything, and Clark goes on to his high school reunion where he reunites with his high school sweetheart, Lana Lang, played by the lovely Annette O’Toole, who went on to much better things as, of all things, Clark Kent’s mom in the Smallville TV series. She notes that Clark hasn’t ‘been back to this burg since your mom passed away.’ When did that happen? She also refers to Metropolis as ‘The Big Apricot.’ That’s… ugh.

Back in Metropolis, uber-villain for this film, because Hackman was disgusted away from it even more than Margot Kidder, we are introduced to scenery-chewing Robert Vaughn. He has caught on to the decimal-shaving computer hacking, but doesn’t know who’s done it (I guess payroll doesn’t note who they send 85 thousand dollars to). He notes that the perpetrator ‘won’t do anything to draw attention to himself unless he’s a complete and utter moron’ and right on cue Gus tears into the parking lot, tires screeching, in a brand new Ferrari. Yes, ha. So Gus gets called into the boss’ office and hired to kill all the coffee crops in Colombia so Vaughn can have a coffee monopoly. Or something. He’s going to hack a weather satellite and, uh, generate weather with it, because as you know, we can create weather with satellites these days, not just monitor it. Coincidentally, the computer terminal to hack this satellite is in Smallville, and the guy who guards it is Clark’s drunken jerkoff high school rival, Brad Wilson. Small world.

Returning to Metropolis, we get a pointless scene where Vaughn and his cronies are skiing on a fake snow-hill on top of a skyscraper, as Gus tells the story of how Superman saved Colombia’s crops, you know, because telling about it is a lot more effective than showing it. Actually, given how poorly this movie handles, well, everything, it probably is more effective. So the eye-candy chick, sort of Vaughn’s version of Miss Teschmacher, comes up with the idea of kryptonite out of thin air, because see, she’s a genius and everyone knows kryptonite kills Superman, right? Why is she a genius? I don’t know. She spends half the movie being a blithering idiot and then saying things that qualify her as this idiot world’s brightest individual. It’s so asinine, that Richard Pryor then skis off the skyscraper to plummet to his doom.

The End.

Well, no, but that would have been better. He survives skiing off the skyscraper, ‘comically’ by skiing down an incline and landing in the street and sort of shuffling through traffic. Seems plausible. He is now assigned to finding kryptonite in space with the weather satellite and reading its molecular contents with a laser so they can synthesize some kryptonite with which to kill Superman. That is the actual, scientific basis of the plot. Then, Superman has gone back to Smallville to go to a little boy’s birthday (did Mort Weisinger write this script, seriously, from beyond the grave or something?) and they give him the key to the city in a giant ceremony and then Richard Pryor shows up in a military jeep dressed up as a general and ‘awards’ Superman a big ol’ chunk of kryptonite, which he accepts graciously and shows no ill effects. Oh, but I’m glossing over the best part, Pryor doing a comedy general speech where he says ‘God has given us one of the greatest gifts in the world! CHEMICALS! We cannot afford a chemical plastics gap!’ I guess we can’t.

So this fake kryptonite doesn’t kill Superman, but it does make him go crazy and stop being a hero. Vaughn admonishes Gus ‘I ask you to kill Superman and you’re telling me you couldn’t do that one simple thing’ and drops the phone in disgust. Camp as a row of tents, I say thee. So Superman goes over to Lana’s house and someone phones her house to get Superman to save some people and he says, ‘There’s no rush.’ ‘But the bridge…’ Lana says. ‘Oh, it’s okay, I always get there in time.’ Then, he doesn’t get there in time, and since he doesn’t really care, he goes to Italy and straightens up the Leaning Tower of Pisa on a lark, then blows out the Olympic ‘eternal flame.’ Vaughn gets his eye-candy to get up in the Statue of Liberty and pretend to be a jumper to seduce Superman. She says for her love he must destroy the last oil tanker not controlled by Vaughn (oh yeah, he got Pryor to hack some other computer and control all of the world’s oil or something, it doesn’t matter). So Superman intercepts the tanker and tears a big hole in it creating a massive, environmentally destructive oil slick. By this point, he is haggard, stubbly, and his uniform is filthy. In the next scene, he’s drunk and hanging out in a bar, flicking beer-nuts at the bottles at high velocities to break them, then melting the mirror with his heat vision. ‘Hey look!’ someone in the crowd shouts, ‘Superman’s drunk!’ Thanks, guy. Lana Lang is fortunately in Metropolis visiting with her really annoying kid, who starts shouting encouragement to the ’sick’ Superman, and we’re treated to being inside Superman’s thoughts as the kid’s inane chatter fills his head for a couple minutes as he flies away in a rage. I’d fly away in a rage too.

Emotionally conflicted, I guess, he lands in a junkyard and separates into Clark Kent and Superman. I’d guess this is supposed to be metaphorical, but then the two of them literally get in a brawl with junkyard stuff, so he literally separated into two beings to pit his good against his evil half. Speaking of which, since when is Clark Kent his good half? Clark Kent is a parody of humanity, a mask to keep his real identity of Superman a secret. For that matter, has no one noticed that Clark’s been missing for days while Superman’s been on his bizarre bender? Or has Clark also been puttering around the Daily Planet offices drunk and surly, beating up Jimmy for looking at him funny and such? Whatever. Superman picks up Clark Kent and tosses him into the air, saying ‘You always wanted to fly, Kent! Now’s your chance!’ What? That… doesn’t… urghh.

Anyway, Clark wins and chokes the evil Superman side to death in the dirt. Seriously. Then he pulls open his shirt to reveal the Superman symbol and flies away to right his wrongs, all miraculously cleaned-up. He goes out to the oil tanker and uh, blows all of the oil back into the hole in the hull. Whaaa? Meanwhile, Pryor is setting up this ultimate computer he designed (because apparently he also has a sudden mega-aptitude for engineering as well), and they build it in a canyon where they have to fly to get down. ‘I just don’t believe a man can fly,’ Pryor says, taking a donkey down instead, and really that sums up this whole stupid movie, doesn’t it? Utter pants.

So they get into the big computer and Superman comes to fight them, and the defenses show up as a kill Superman arcade game where the missiles score points and all that, which is too silly for words, and after he breaches all those defenses it flashes ‘GAME OVER.’ Anyway, Superman defeats them and Gus helps him by unplugging the computer and it’s all too stupid to even bother with. Lana Lang is hired as a secretary to Perry White for whatever reason and they get a computer in the office which doesn’t work, so the moral of the story is all computers are bad. The end, for real this time.

Godawful, and it’s STILL not the worst this series had to offer.

Favourite Character: Lana Lang is the least irritating factor in the movie, so she wins by default. It helps that Annette O’Toole is a very attractive woman and a charming actress, even if she had little outlet for it in this turd of a film.

Favourite Scene/Moment: Drunk Superman. Idiotic, but pretty memorable nonetheless.

Favourite Line: ‘CHEMICALS!’ Highly quotable one, that.

~ by jshopa on June 26, 2008.