90 minutes went by and nothing happened.
1987’s Superman 4 was the brainchild of Canon. Those guys that made all the Deathwishes, Exterminators, van Damme movies, Breakin’, etc. Its all for the money. Who cares about story? Usually movies have three acts, introduction, low point for the lead and victory. These acts are split, usually, evenly in the duration. Not this movie. You have about 60 minutes of act one, 5 minutes of acts two and then 25 minutes of the act three fight. Its all very slow and boring.
The plot is about Lex Luther that escapes prison, steals a thing, puts it in a missile, gets superman to throw all missiles into the sun, Lex’s missile hatches a bad guy, bad guy fights superman and loses.
There is no sub-plot either. We thought it would be that the Daily Planet was bought over by someone. Nope, a line or two. That’s all. Was it the daughter that wanted to band Super? Nope, he cares about his granny too much. His granny was his girlfriend in the previous three movies too. Lois Lane was her name.
There are very long chase scenes in the fight scenes. This is purely for padding. Super could kill the bad guy in seconds. The baddie was also a solar powered guy for some reason. Super had a chance to kill him. He already had the baddie in a box and in space during a time where the Earth blocked the sun. He could just fire bad guy off to space where its darker. Nope. Forget him, sun comes through the gap in the box’s doors, he charges up and repeats another 10 minute fight.
This is a simple good guy vs bad guy movie. But they fail at this plot too. There was no motivation for the bad guy. He hatched in the sun, why did he come to earth? Why did he only take orders from Lex? Why did he not just destroy everything? Why did he have clothes? Why is he angry?
This movie was so bad, it didn’t even make enough money to cover its production budget. About half of the movie had a lazy rear projection. The other half was on a set. The sets looked good. This is probably where the budget went.
Watch this movie because you love to laugh at bad movies.
