Superman 4: The Quest For Peace
And thus in 1987 came the final crash and burn of the once revered Christopher Reeve Superman Legacy with this release whose greatest sin perhaps lies in the untold potential which the film had to not only be the best in the series, but to bring ultimate full circle to the whole Superman as Christ / Messiah figure which Richard Donner had first brought to the table in the 1978 original. The seeds for the failure were set in motion early. First, original producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind had sold their interests in the series to Cannon Films, an outfit best known for making piles and piles of 80s action schlock. Secondly, both Donner and Richard Lester were offered the directing job based on their work in the previous films and both of them turned it down flat (although which of the two was offered the job first remains unknown) leading the new producers to settle on longtime journeyman Sidney J. Furie (who feuded heavily on the set with Reeve). Reeve himself had grown tired of the role, only agreeing to take part should the studio finance a pet project of his called Street Smart (which did little for Reeveâs career but helped launch Morgan Freeman into stardom with his first Oscar nomination) and also give him the creative right to come up with the story for this sequel which was then written up by two established screenwriters. Nonetheless, Reeve would later publicly and bitterly state that doing the film was the biggest mistake of his career since it was a âcastastropheâ from start to finish. Reeve even feuded on set with his longtime Lois Lane Margot Kidder who in later years would say that his involvement in developing the story had given him a massively inflated ego which had led to their clashes. Even worse, the budget on the film was slashed nearly in half just prior to filming, helping to destroy the projected special effects work and reducing it to being quite literally the cheapest looking Superman film of them all (at times it almost looks like a middle of the road episode of a long running TV show). And yet the promise of what could have been (coupled with the abject failure of how it actually turned out) has long been a point of fascination. Reeveâs concept was written and actually filmed as a near two and a half hour epic but was severely edited down to a mere 90 minutes, killing a lot of its momentum along with the cheap and often recycled special effects, but it was Reeveâs idea of having Superman fulfill his ultimate destiny of âsaving the worldâ by destroying all nuclear weapons that was intriguing in its sincerity, as nuclear disarmament was a hot topic in real life at that time and Superman with his abilities was certainly the one to carry it out on the big screen. Along with Kidder, series stalwarts Jackie Cooper and Marc McClure would return also (although McClureâs Jimmy Olsen only gets about 90 seconds of screen time basically doing nothing) but the most welcome return was that of none other than Gene Hackman reprising his deliciously diabolical Lex Luthor (a return in more ways than one as Hackman had shot all of his scenes for 1 and 2 back in 1978 and never spent a day filming for Lester) who carries along with him his idiot nephew Lenny Luthor played by Jon Cryer (hot off playing Duckie in Pretty In Pink) even as Cryer is mostly reduced to spouting moronic surfer dude catchphrases with his dialogue. As said, this boasted a lot of pretty good ideas going in (unlike Superman 3 which had its one real bad idea of casting Richard Pryor as its pseudo villain / sidekick to Robert Vaughnâs main villain and never recovered) that were ostensibly undermined by its low budget and poor writing. One of those ideas is having The Daily Planet taken over (and Cooperâs Perry White run out of a job) by a media mogul tycoon played by the formerly blacklisted actor Sam Wanamaker who puts his sexy, spoiled daughter (Mariel Hemingway) in charge with the intent of turning The Planet into a sleazy tabloid with sensationalistic headlines even as Hemingway develops a crush on Reeveâs Clark Kent due to his boy scout like nature (keeping in mind that Superman still belongs to Lois). On that note, there is the VERY fascinating dynamic in regards to Loisâ relationship to Clark / Superman in that there not only remains an almost subliminal knowledge on her part that they are one and the same (leading to a number of scenes where she talks to Clark as if sheâs talking to Superman on the pretense that Clark will âpass the message on to himâ), but he even reveals himself to her directly once again (much to her delight) and she tells him that she really hasnât forgotten anything about their relationship (although he ends the conversation with a âmemory kissâ like in Lesterâs version of Part 2). This also brings up the idea of certain ârulesâ that Kryptonâs elders had imparted to him such as âHold no one above all others and love all humanityâ and âDo not interfere in the political events of the humansâ, all of which he breaks or has broken in the past. Ultimately, these ideas go nowhere when poised against the bigger picture, that of having Hackmanâs Luthor steal some of Supermanâs DNA so that he can genetically engineer his own superhuman being, that being Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow, in many ways a mystery man to this day due to this being his only movie role), a grunting, snorting, long blonde haired pretty boy (whose amplified voice is actually dubbed by Hackman) who more importantly, has the power to pierce Supermanâs skin and wound him in combat with the radiation he carries having the ability to contaminate his health and subject him to a long, slow death from radiation poisoning while Luthor gleefully rearms the world with nuclear weapons and makes billions in the process. The infamous hatchet job that the film underwent prior to release (which cut 45 minutes from the running time) would eventually reveal that Pillowâs Nuclear Man was really the SECOND one that Luthor had created, with the first one being a bumbling, stumbling, malformed, virtual retard with super powers whom Superman would easily outsmart and defeat, that Luthor in his new position as a worldwide arms dealer would receive worldwide diplomatic immunity from The United Nations in order to carry out his business, and (most interestingly) when the second Nuclear Man had appeared to go so haywire that he would literally bring about a global nuclear holocaust completely on his own, Luthor and Lenny would panic and head for their custom made bomb shelter before Superman saved the day, actually leading Luthor (before being brought back to prison) to begrudgingly acknowledge that Superman was the true savior of the world after all. Also cut out were other action scenes with unfinished special effects (not that the stuff in the finished movie was all that impressive either) and one can clearly see that if the same love and care was given to this film that the first 2 received (as did Part 3 although no amount of money could have saved that one) that at the very least Reeve could have signed off on the role on a very high note, as sequences that show Superman rescuing Russian cosmonauts and Italian villagers all while speaking to them and acknowledging them in their own native tongue come off as touching bits that greatly reinforce the idea of Superman being the global savior of all mankind. But then there are moments like the Hemingway character (a regular human) being flown into deep space by Nuclear Man and surviving, Luthor escaping prison by having Lenny drive into his work detail and tricking the guards into checking out his sound system (especially with such a high security risk prisoner like Luthor on the premises), flying scenes that look like cardboard cutouts zooming around and also having Superman act surprised upon encountering Luthor when surely Lexâs escape would have been big news that was long since known to him. While one doesnât doubt the sincerity of Reeveâs intentions (and his UN speech at the end IS somewhat moving), the fact that what should have been a high powered sequel was instead reduced to being on the level of a b-movie is one of the most unforgivable acts of lazy filmmaking everâŚ
4/10