A Year of Garbage Movies #63, “Super IV: The Quest for Peace” (1987)

I’m not really a Superman fan. I’ll put that out there right from the start. The only movie I’ve seen is “Superman Returns” (2006), but that movie was directed by Bryan Singer and stars Kevin Spacey so it has been double cancelled.

That said, I don’t think my preference in superheroes had an impact on how much I enjoyed this movie, which is to say not at all. Maybe at this point I’m used to our current generation of superhero movies: huge budgets, PG-13 content, and a complex universe of characters so that a movie can be released every 6 months or so. The Christopher Reeves Superman movies come from a different time, but I think even this one stands out as a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

At this point we all know the trope about how nobody can figure out that Clark Kent is superman with glasses. But at some point the whole shtick with Superman coming up with Vaudeville-esque routines to play both Superman and Clark Kent in the same location stops being amusing. That point is after the first 30 seconds, but unfortunately that whole premise takes up the majority of this movie.

Gene Hackman plays Lex Luthor, barely. I’ve always known him to be bald but apparently that is not the case. After escaping from the dumbest prison guards on the planet, he strolls into the Smithsonian, smashes open a display case containing a strand of Superman’s hair suspending a 1000lb weight, then snips it with a bike lock and runs out without being caught.