Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

Very disappointing...

So much average

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Superman IV isn't exactly the finest moment in the Superman franchise. The effects are poor, the sets are cheap, the editing is choppy and the script doesn't make much sense. There is, however, some good stuff within this 1987 sequel that makes it better than other bad sequels. The Alexander Courage score is wonderful, dramatic and sweeping and really lifts the movie during the action sequences. Mariel Hemingway's character, the lovely Lacy Warfield is a fresh character that adds much to the production. She's very pretty too. Gene Hackman makes a welcome return as the camp Lex Luthor and he has some funny moments with his nephew, Lenny Luthor. The story has some good themes and messages but they seem to get lost within the incoherent nature of the structure. It's nowhere near as entertaining as the first, second or even third Superman flicks but it's still a charming little flick that could have been so much more. 6/10 from me.

For sure, the results is awful as the feat is impossible to get, even for a Superman! In the man of steel comics, you can find brilliant comics about a dark or stupid clone of Superman called Bizzaro! And you can also find other comics about Superman becoming internationally involved (like in the beautiful Peace on Earth in which he wants to eradicate starvation). Here, we have the two stories mixed together with Luthor being the conductor behind but the production just tears everything apart! Luthor is becoming a mere clown assisted by a rock and roll nephew??? There are a lot of scenes that doesn't make sense at all: sure it was the same for S3, but the entire movie was funny and the crazy things make laugh: here it's totally serious and those nonsense just don't fit: humans flying alone and even breathing in space, Supe rebuilding China wall with his eyes ! Clone is seeded by the sun and born as a talking adult with his costume neatly done (even with the chest N for Nuclear Man!) and I could go on: the scratches, the krypton crystal, … The effects are horrible: done 10 years after the first and the effects looks like a poor 50s B-movie: wires everywhere, moon space is a dark curtain (not even flat), same shots used in different parts…. And the final blow with a salvage editing: if I watched only the screen version, I rate it 1 because the elements of each plots don't make sense together. My dad DVD has deleted scenes and those lost 30 minutes helps the movie: the 1st dumb clone is not that bad and the race arms is much better told with the Kremlin and everything else! At the end, if this quest for peace was challenging, all the more than Supe had a view of the whole planet instead of saving Lois or a cat or a man drowning, this last Christopher movie is nonetheless a missed opportunity!

My film knowledge is clearly wanting, because I found out only yesterday that Milton Keynes doubled Metropolis during the making of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - a fact which alone sums up the scope, ambition and grandeur of Sidney J Furies's nail in the Man of Steel's cinematic coffin for almost twenty years. Looking back, it's so apparent what different an age these Superman movies lived in, a 1980's where comic-book movies were seen as disposable fluff, certainly not keeping up with the tide of seminal graphic novels that only now is cinema truly catching up with. The Quest for Peace is very close to being an outright abomination, saved primarily by the goodwill radiating from the whole thing... saved not enough, mind you, to prevent rendering it as possibly the worst comic-book movie ever made, or certainly close to its pure nadir.You could cite a million problems. Story. Script. Production. Casting. It's pretty much got the lot, which in itself is an achievement. The low budget means Furie has to shoot in wholly unrepresentative locations that are so far away from the classy glamour of the first movie it's unreal, while ironically given Hollywood was on the verge of CGI breakthroughs around this time, the effects are the shoddiest of all four movies; the story starts in earnest fashion, with the interesting notion of Superman being called upon to interject in a nuclear arms race (though given, at this point, America & Russia were practically bowling buddies, it's not exactly razor sharp political commentary) utterly shattered when it descends (after a bizarre sequence where Supes throws ALL the nukes INTO THE SUN - surely that's a terrible idea, scientists?) into yet another dumb Lex Luthor farce of a plan and introduces the most laughable antagonist in comic-book history... NUCLEAR MAN! Oooooh! Run from his poodle perm! Hide from the daft lycra suit somehow created by the mad Frankenstein physics that creates him! Duck when he swipes you with his long, trimmed nails! I genuinely am not exaggerating about this guy... seriously, if he'd been accompanied throughout by Pepsi & Shirley, they would not have seemed out of place. In a way, he's brilliant for comedy - you try and fathom WHY he picks up the Statue of Liberty and decides to lob it down on a New York street. Good luck with that. He's just... amazingly awful, and once he turns up it just descends into the worst battle for supremacy you're ever likely to see on film. Poor Gene Hackman - he should have carved a comic-book legacy as Luthor, sadly he may just be remembered for all the wrong reasons when it comes to these films... I just hope he got paid well, frankly.Is it all bad? Well... yes. Almost. I feel most sorry for Christopher Reeve - what a way to exit his most iconic role, though admittedly he didn't necessarily know it'd be his last, but he must have known this was garbage. He does gamely well, in fairness, as charming and effortless as ever, and way above the material. Ditto Margot Kidder, reinstated properly here as Lois Lane, who gives possibly her sleekest & most assured performance in the role, again despite working with detritus (and having to share too much screen time with Mariel Hemingway's wet lettuce love rival). Those two just--just--make watching this worthwhile but only, truly, if you are a Superman completest. No, really.Superman IV has a lot to answer for, really. It--and the preceeding movie--meant very few movie makers in Hollywood took the superhero genre seriously for a long, long time and though Tim Burton's Batman would level the playing field a little more soon after, The Quest for Peace truly showed how not to treat Superman or his genre.

"Superman IV: Quest for Peace" should have been renamed "Superman IV: Quest for a Plot" as the film's script is pure garbage...full of schmaltz, preachiness and so many things that simply are dumb and make little sense. It's also a film that clearly shows the limits of special effects, as even with 1980s technology the film should have looked so much better--especially since it's about the most effects-laden Superman film up to that time.The story is full of saccharine when the entire planet stops to take notice of some little boy who writes to Superman to request that he bring about world peace! Superman, never wanting to disappoint any child, responds by destroying the world's nuclear stockpile. However, Lex Luthor disguises one of the nuclear missiles as just a garden variety nuclear bomb when really it's infused with some Superman DNA. So, when the missile is tossed into the sun, it naturally produces an evil Krytonian who is bent on killing Superman and working for Luthor. Can our incredibly plastic hero destroy this evil menace AND balance two women...one who is beautiful and loves Clark and another who's an idiot who STILL can't understand that Clark and Superman are the same freaking guy!!While the story is saccharine and stupid and the special effects quite bad, the film team do manage to also make the acting terrible- -even by Superman standards. The standout in this department is Jon Cryer-- who really can act. But given the bilge the writers (a room full of baboons, I think), he comes off as simply annoying and hateful. The rest, by the way, aren't much better.So do I recommend this film? Yes and no. No if you want to see a decent film. Yes if you are either using it to torture someone or if you are a glutton for punishment, like me, and occasionally enjoy laughing at Hollywood stars destroying themselves. A little schadenfreude is what's needed to enjoy this picture, that's for sure.