For the father and son film makers the Salkinds, there was a strange preoccupation with the supporting casts which would include big and expensive stars like Marlon Brando, the late Gene Hackman and Terence Stamp. So much so that they were higher up the cast list than the actor playing Superman Christopher Reeve. By the third movie in 1983, this approach tripped them up as it was a vehicle dominated by comic actor Richard Pryor who they’d cast with top billing after plenty of pre-production issues and following his success at the box office in movies like ‘Stir Crazy’ and ‘Silver Streak’.
It’s a bizarre feature of the opening credits to see Pryor’s name ahead of the likes of Reeve and it is not helped by Gene Hackman refusing to return as Lex Luthor, instead his villainy was replaced by the far less charismatic Robert Vaughn as tech mogul Ross Webster.
The changes from the first two films in the series are manifest from the start as the pre-credit titles roll by during several minutes of slapstick in Metropolis as Superman goes about saving the locals from a car slamming into a water hydrant, burning toy penguins and a blind man falling down a coal hole.
The viewer is left in no doubt this is going to be very different from the far more serious and fantastical Superman II. We are introduced to the down on his luck Gus Gorman (Pryor) who gets a job working in the IT department of Webscoe where he works out how to hack into the payroll database after learning there is excess slush money in there. Webster discovers this and demands help from Gorman, regarding him as a computer genius which seems far fetched.
Meanwhile elsewhere in the Daily Planet, Clark Kent is covering a story on his folksy home town Smallville. Lois Lane is off on holiday with absolutely no acknowledgment of what transpired between them in the second film. Clark travels to Smallville with Daily Planet photographer Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) in tow. Kent attends a high school reunion as he is reacquainted with adolescent sweet heart Lara Lang (the doe eyed Anna O’Toole) who it is clear he still has feelings for. Via flashback sequences we learn that the teenage Clark was bullied by jock Brad Wilson (Gavin O’Herlihy) who remains on the scene having now become a sweaty drunk and harassing Lara. Coincidentally, one of O’Herlihy’s other rare movie performances came in the same year in a Bond film – Never Say Never Again – that includes an arcade game very similar to the one that Superman will be face later.
It’s around this time that the nefarious scheme from Webster begins as he commands Gormless to assist him so that the latter uses his computer skills to manipulate a weather satellite to wipe out Colombia’s coffee crops. Webster wants to corner the market with coffee being the first of many commodities.
Gorman does indeed order a storm to wreck the crops in Colombia. Superman intervenes and saves the country much to the chagrin of Webster. Gorman is tasked with rustling up some kryptonite in an attempt to kill the man in tights.
Soon enough, Superman is being thanked for saving the townsfolk in Smallville from a fire in a nearby chemical plant. Gormless shows up purporting to be a US soldier of superior rank to present Superman with the dodgy kryptonite he’s knocked up. Unfortunately, during its creation, Gormless couldn’t work out what all the components were so he used ‘tar’ inspired by his reliance on cigarettes and spotting it on a fag packet. That synthetic ‘kryptonite’ might very well be a metaphor for this film where everyone is scratching around for the missing key ingredient.
The phoney kryptonite leads to a fun sequence where Superman separates into two beings; his normal self and an evil alter ego who amusingly gets drunk and then terrorises international shipping before fighting it out with Clark Kent in a scrapyard where Kent throws him in an acid bath and pushes him into a car crusher. The Kent ego prevails and, as normal Superman, promptly atones for the damage his evil side did by adjusting the leaning Tower of Pisa which he previously straightened up much to the exasperation of a local Tuscan purveyor of souvenirs.
Gus Gormless is too stupid to put two and two together while he and Webster continue in their efforts to kill the Man of Steel. Gormless asks Webster to build him a super computer which he does in the desert; the plan being to lure Superman there and disable him. They are successful in that as Superman is assaulted by missiles activated in the canyon containing the giant computer compound. Superman gets his hands on a cannister of acid, referring back to the chemical plant that he stopped from exploding earlier in the movie. He deploys the acid to destroy the hard drive of the super computer and Webster is defeated.
There are, presumably unintentionally, some interesting ideas floating around in this bloated movie. The concept of alter egos and duality are prescient throughout. We have two Supermans, Vera’s inhumane instincts are manifest in the cyborg she briefly becomes. Gus moonlights as the techno criminal while being a Yo-yo enthusiast who smokes heavily and acts the fool.
Lorelei (Pamela Stephenson), assistant and mistress to Webster pretends to be a harmless bimbo but this hides her real persona as a well read computer expert as she considers Nietzsche and can recognise the blueprints of a computer processor while otherwise seeming preoccupied with her nails and make up.
These are mere ideas that are touched upon and nothing is really done with them. We fail to get a proper explanation as to why such a small ingredient as tar could make the kryptonite have such an adverse effect on our hero. For instance.
There are plenty of problems with Superman III. The tone is all wrong and it doesn’t have the strong characterisations that made the previous films so special. Webster just isn’t a patch on Lex Luthor but the real stumbling block is Richard Pryor. He gets a disproportionate amount of screen time and the attempt at forming a comic partnership between him and Vaughan is feeble. There is some panto-esque fun to be had with Webster’s loathsome sister Vera (Annie Ross), especially when she is possessed by the super computer and converted into a cyborg who nearly thwarts the Man of Steel. Pryor is in need of a comic partner to bounce off which was the essence of his success, especially when he was buddied with Gene Wilder.
The issues are compounded by the sensation that the makers and writers Leslie and David Newman along with director Richard Lester don’t know the audience they want to play to. The earlier films were examples of strong movie storytelling; they could appeal to children, adolescents and adults alike. Here, we have an actor who was usually in X-rated stand up comedy and prone to dropping the F word in his movies. Lorelei’s whole masquerade is a joke that likely would go over the heads of a younger audience.
The fight between Clark and Evil Superman is a highlight of the film but that trope is repeated here as in Superman II, when Superman became human in the Fortress of Solitude, he bled and was savagely beaten before his redemption. Similarly in Superman IV, his foe Nuclear Man is formed using DNA from Superman who is then terrorised by the former.
There were originally plans to introduce Brainiac or Mister Mxyzptlk as the villains in Superman III along with featuring Supergirl. One wonders if that was a missed opportunity especially when one considers the full film of ‘Supergirl’ which was a confusing mess. One suspects while watching this that they’d over reached themselves by making the third Superman movie along with a spin off.
Worse was to come with Superman IV yet the standards began dropping here and the franchise never really recovered.
Athon 