Superman Retrospective: Superman III

Superman III (1983)
Starring: Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Robert Vaughn
Directed by: Richard Lester


You may have noticed I haven't gone ahead and put the Superman series under my "Favorite Franchises." We've arrived to the main reason I'm not able to consider it a favorite: Any of the movies to take place after Superman II. I don't have a novelty or nostalgia for Superman and I'm discovering a lot of these movies for the first time, so I'm still figuring out how I feel about the original Superman series before I can label it a favorite. However, if my reactions to the next couple of films are like how the other moviegoers have reacted to them, I think the title of my reviews will remain how they are. Superman III was the beginning of the end in quality for the original series of films. Where did it go wrong? Had the novelty worn off? Had the studios run out of idea? I can't say for sure, but I can say that it's just a really boring movie, with a handful of decent effects and maybe one or two good ideas, that made the biggest mistake a Superman movie can make by making a movie that isn't really about Superman.

So, who is Superman III about? Richard Pryor as computer genius Gus Gorman. Talk about completely missing the mark with a role. I won't dispute that Pryor was one of the best comedians of his era, but he doesn't belong in this movie. AT ALL. He has more camera time in the film than Superman does. And that's just wrong. His performance is so bumbling and awkward that it's actually painful to watch. If you watched this performance and I told you Pryor's day job was being a standup comedian, you'd assume I'm lying. It's THAT bad of a performance. There's other villains in the film, but they're pretty generic in comparison to how much of a ham Pryor is trying to be. To think, the logic of Warner Bros. at the time was to follow up great villains like Lex Luthor and General Zod with Richard Pryor. Were they smoking Kryptonite or something?

There's not a whole bunch to write home about in Superman III, so I might as well talk up a few pros the series has going for it that I haven't brought up yet. I'll start with Clark Kent's day job at the Daily Planet. It holds two very good depictions of classic Superman characters. Perry White, played by Jackie Cooper, is a great no-nonsense editor for the paper and Jimmy Olsen, played by Marc McClure, is a young and energetic photographer. Both play a key part in the environment that takes up most of Clark's time, so we get to know them a little more over the course of the movies. Interestingly, McClure is the first person to appear as a comic book movie character 5 different times (the 4 Superman movies and the Supergirl spinoff). That's something you'd expect to be achieved first by Hugh Jackman or Robert Downey, Jr., not from the guy who played Jimmy Olsen. Cooper was part of the 4 Superman movies as well, making these two the only main characters and actors to be in the same number of movies as Superman and Lois Lane.

Now's a better time than any to address that epic Superman theme song, courtesy of John Williams. All the movies in the original series used this majestic song, despite having different composers for every film. They just kept coming back to that John Williams theme because it so perfectly captures the spectacle of the Man of Steel. Odds are this is the song that comes to mind when you picture Superman. It's John Williams for crying out loud. Of course it's going to be a fantastic song.

Trying way too hard to be funny, Superman III comes off more as a giant bore. Having Christopher Reeve step aside for Richard Pryor in the battle for screen time is not the memorable blockbuster experience moviegoers were looking for. And that's a real shame because there are a couple of things worth noting that actually work in the film. There are a number of scenes where they really brought their A game in terms of special effects and I wish these effects could have been utilized for a much better film. There's an amazing, but brief, subplot involving Superman turning into a bit of a jerk. This gives Reeve an amazing opportunity to take Superman to that attitude and behavior he would normally never get to go and could even draw some inspiration from Bizarro. There's an amazing tease for an impending love triangle between Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Lana Lang, played by Annette O'Toole (a fun easter egg for all you Smallville fans out there), and it goes absolutely nowhere by the next film. All these ideas work, but the problem is they aren't even remotely memorable when you look at the film as a whole. When you say the title Superman III, all I can remember is that it is inferior to the first 2 movies and made the idiotic mistake of having Richard Pryor be the main character in a Superman movie.


Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

The two biggest problems I can have with Superman III is that it's a boring movie, as well as a movie that feels more like fans of Richard Pryor instead of fans of Superman. If you like visual effects or the hint at Bizarro Superman, then you might like a few scenes here and there, but this is one you can easily skip.

Superman III and movie images are copyrighted by Warner Bros.