What can I say about Superman 3.
After the 2 revolutionary Richard Donner Superman movies, which were some of the first movies to introduce green screen effects to mainstream movies and were also the first movies to introduce us to the overly nerdy Clark Kent and his incredibly likable alter-ego, we are treated with the third installment of the franchise. In many ways Superman 3 is a disappointment, mostly because at this point, a series that had already taken a lot of liberty with its source material just seemed to stray even further away from it. I'm not saying that we needed a super serious Superman at this point, this movie was in fact made before the comic revolution of the late 80's so I wouldn't have made that much sense. However I would have liked to see a Brainiac or a Metallo or even the fucking Parasite not a Lex Luthor clone and his wacky sidekicks!
Anyway if you can look past the completelly dull story and incredible unoriginality, its still a very enjoyable movie. Especially if you enjoy 80's cheese. I found myself laughing a lot a this movie. Mostly at the blatant racial stereotypes and cheesy dialogue.
Okay so here's the story: Some evil businessman blackmails one of his employees, a stereotypical comic relief black man (Richard Pryor) , who is apparently also a computer genius, to create kryptonite to kill Superman. (Yes... the rich white man has the unemployed computer genius black man do his dirty work...) Superman that had earlier thwarted his plan to destroy the cofee crops in Colombia... or something... I forget. The fake kryptonite doesn't kill Superman, but instead makes him evil. This is when the movie gets pretty fucking awesome. Evil Superman is pretty much a jerk. Firstly he blows off saving a train from crashing because he's too busy trying to bang Lana Lang (what a babe, played by Annette O'Toole aka Martha Kent from Smallville). Then he just goes around for the next ten minutes and shits on everyone, he blows out the olympic flame, pushes up the leaning tower of Pisa, he even decides to go bang the evil dudes' assistant, a stereotypical dumb blonde who is also apparently some kind of genius and at the end of the day decides to go get smashed at the bar. (See image)
He also stops shaving and grows some scruff. Bad-Ass!Right after that he splits himself in 2 (good Clark Kent and Evil Superman) They have an epic battle in a junk yard, Evil Superman get choked to death and disappears and then Clark turns back into good Superman. From then on Superman fights an evil Supercomputer/Cyborg (Which brings up the question of why didn't they just make Brainiac the villain in the first place?!) and saves the world blah blah.
This movie usually gets a bad wrap because its not as good as the first two, and it isn't obviously. I still think its a really funny and enjoyable movie with a lot of great moments. For example: Superman freezes a lake, picks it up and drops it on a fire, there's also a ski hill on top of a freaking building! There's a bunch of other awesome random things throughout the movie.
Although this isn't an amazing movie, I recommend it to anyone that enjoys really cheesy movies. I laughed my head off watching this movie.
Also I'd just like to point out that Christopher Reeve's (R.I.P.) might not be the most incredible actor, but he was still one heck of a Superman. I love watching him in these movies and I don't know if anyone else could have pulled it off quite like him.
Here's hoping we get a good Superman reboot in the near future. God knows we need it.
Check out this awesome video Kevin Smith talking about why Superman movies never seem to get it right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYhLIThTvk
-BeaverMoose
O.K. this is a fairer review than the otheres I have read, but you should remember the budget was 25 million shorter than what they had to spend on Superman I and II, so inevitably it would suffer. However I still love the film though. Now how about a Superman IV review!
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