It’s hard to believe that there’s a Superman movie out there that features both a rogue supercomputer and a twisted, evil duplicate of the Man of Steel, yet doesn’t feature either Brainiac or Bizarro. But somehow Superman III exists, and, mind-bogglingly, casts aside two of Superman’s best-known opponents for silly stand-ins. This is problematic, obviously, but it’s also among the least of the movie’s flaws. Directed by Richard Lester (the man behind the goofy reshoots that prop up the better material in this film’s predecessor, 1980’s Superman II), Superman III shows what happens when the heroic legacy of the world’s most famous superhero is taken out of the hands of a respectful cinematic caretaker like Richard Donner and is left to the whims of the series’ increasingly flaky producer Alexander Salkind.
The slapstick, Rube Goldberg-style disaster sequence that befalls the citizens of Metropolis in Superman III‘s opening credits set the tone for what follows. Richard Pryor plays Gus Gorman, a natural computer whiz whose skills are exploited by his ruthless employer, Ross Webster (Robert Vaughan). Webster enlists Gorman to help him first take over a government satellite so he can destroy Columbia’s coffee-based economy through weather manipulation (seriously!). When Superman foils this plot, Webster and the increasingly conscience-afflicted Gus hatch a revenge plot that hinges upon creating a synthetic Kryptonite substitute that somehow turns the Last Son of Krypton into a surly, drunken shadow of his former self. Webster also builds a massively powerful computer based on Gus’ designs, one that employs Weird Science-levels of 1980s high-tech wizardry to achieve…well, pretty much anything its users can imagine. There’s also a subplot that features Clark Kent going back to Smallville for his high school reunion and reconnecting with old crush Lana Lang (Annette O’Toole, one of the film’s only bright spots), now a single mom with an annoying kid.
Superman III is the kind of instantly-dated grab bag of then-current trends and ideas that the original Superman probably would have turned into if Donner and his collaborator Tom Mankiewicz hadn’t been around to stop it. It’s Pryor’s movie more than anyone’s, and even he looks like he doesn’t know what he’s doing there (the part was allegedly written for him after the producers saw Pryor on The Tonight Show confessing his appreciation for Superman II). Obviously, the Silver Age publishing history of the Superman comics was filled with zany transformations and oddball what-if scenarios, but those comics have a good-natured sense of fun about them that’s missing from this haphazard mess of a movie. Christopher Reeve is as iconic as ever as both Superman and Clark Kent, and he does surprisingly well in the part of the unshaven, drunken Superman doppelganger (so much so that you wish he actually did get to appear as Bizarro). But even Reeve and the appealingly wholesome Annette O’Toole (who would also go on to play Ma Kent on Smallville) can only do so much with the ridiculous, lurching, jokey plot–the already-overlong movie’s two-hour running time somehow feels like eight. If you’ve ever complained about the quality of a modern-day superhero movie or sequel, you might want to revisit this film to see what it was like when filmmakers immediately jettisoning the source material was the rule rather than the exception. It’s really the only reason to ever waste your time watching Superman III.
