“I’m sorry, but that wasn’t me. That guy’s gone.”

Superman III is such an oddity of a film for a multitude of reasons. There are a few great ideas in there, and I’ll definitely mention them, but overall, it’s a disjointed mess that feels completely disconnected from the first two films (and either cut of Superman II). The original theatrical version of Superman II had tonal inconsistencies due to the very different approaches of the two people who filmed the movie, Richard Donner and the director who got the credit, Richard Lester. Donner was a lot more serious and epic in his approach to Superman, while still maintaining a fun camp, while Lester was completely slapstick and goofy with his take.

I’m not even going to start off my review by introducing the plot, because it will probably make you fall asleep while reading this. For Superman III, Lester got to direct the entire movie, and it really shows, but before I get to that, I’ll talk about what I did like about the film. The first thing is that there are a very few number of scenes where Superman gets to do something cool and John Williams’ brilliant score kicks in. Very few, but they are still there. As I already mentioned, there are some really good ideas. Evil Superman is a cool concept, and the sort of metaphoric showdown was really cool to see. It’s actually so interesting that I wouldn’t mind seeing it brought to the screen again sometime, but obviously in a better fashion and in a better movie.

I’m also a big fan of everything with Lana Lang and Smallville. Going back to Superman’s (or Clark’s) hometown is definitely a natural thing to do to take the story for the third movie, and I really enjoyed seeing that. There were some things that happened in Smallville that happened offscreen and are just explained away without much attention drawn to them, but with all the other problems with this movie, this was definitely tiny in comparison. With what happened at the end of Superman II (again, either version) and the lack of Lois Lane in this film, I liked the sort of romance that was going on between Clark and Lana Lang as they revisited their high school memories together, and I liked where it went by the end of the story.

But these positives are barely explored in a satisfying way at all. Instead, the vast, vast majority of the runtime is dedicated to random shenanigans with Richard Pryor’s character, who, at least to me, felt like he got the central arc, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. It’s called “Superman III.” His arc is literally that he hacks into a billionaire company man’s payroll system, gets hired by that same man to do his bad stuff, does the bad stuff, and then feels bad about it at the end. What makes it worse, is that his character isn’t interesting or compelling at all. He is a pure slapstick character who is meant to be funny but isn’t at all.

I didn’t like the tonal inconsistencies that Lester added to Superman II, and much prefer Donner’s tone to his, and so the fact that Lester got to make his own Superman movie entirely was something that I already knew I probably wasn’t going to like. Just like Richard Pryor’s character, the tone is slapstick - a parody of itself. You can’t take anything that happens seriously because the movie doesn’t even take itself seriously. The epic and whimsical feeling of the first Superman and Donner’s cut of Superman II is completely gone, and replaced with stuff that makes for a nothingburger of a movie.

This makes the movie commit the ultimate cinema “no-no,” by just being completely boring all the way through. The pacing is absolutely horrendous, with no sense of direction at all, and I was paying attention to the runtime almost the entire movie. Being boring is worse than being bad, and frankly, this movie does both of them with ease. Adding to the boring nature are the villains. They aren’t even from the comics and don’t feel like comic book characters at all, and their evil scheme is something that I don’t at all understand seeing the writer’s thinking was actually interesting.

The last thing I’ll talk about is Superman in general. He has hints of good stuff in the movie, but majorly for the most part, Christopher Reeve was given basically nothing to be as iconic as he was in the first two films. I liked his dynamic with Lana Lang, but it wasn’t explored enough, and even then, I liked his dynamic with Lois Lane a lot more. The writers also chose the least interesting and most silly things for Superman to do while he was going through his main arc.

I know this review seems a lot more cynical than most of my reviews, but I truly do not like this movie at all. Richard Lester clearly doesn’t understand the character of Superman, and it shows the most in this movie.