Superman III is a comedy, a science fiction thriller, and a disaster movie, all rolled into one overstuffed package. It is also the third entry in the Superman film series, and it is the one that tried to do everything at once and ended up doing none of it well.
The film opens with Clark Kent returning to Smallville for his high school reunion. He reconnects with Lana Lang, who has a young son named Ricky. Along the way, Superman extinguishes a fire at a chemical plant, and Jimmy Olsen is injured during the rescue. The reunion sets the stage for a larger conflict, but the movie spends far too long on the small-town nostalgia before it gets to the villainy.
That villain is Ross Webster, a wealthy industrialist who builds a powerful supercomputer to control the world. His plan involves destroying coffee crops in Colombia to corner the market, then redirecting oil tankers to create an energy crisis. He hires the bumbling computer genius Gus Gorman to carry out these schemes, and he uses his sister Vera and his mistress Lorelei Ambrosia to manipulate Gus into compliance.
The problem is that the movie does not know what kind of story it wants to be. It starts as a family drama about Clark reconnecting with Lana, then shifts into a corporate thriller about Ross’s schemes, then turns into a comedy about Superman’s corrupted behavior, and finally ends as a disaster movie with an oil spill. None of these threads are given enough room to breathe.
Christopher Reeve plays Clark Kent and Superman with his usual earnestness, but the script asks him to commit some of the worst crimes against dignity in the entire series. Superman starts acting like a child after exposure to synthetic kryptonite, straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa and blowing out the Olympic Flame. These moments are meant to be funny, but they land as embarrassing rather than clever.
Richard Pryor plays Gus Gorman as a bumbling genius, and he is the only performer in the cast who seems to be having fun. His scenes are the most watchable parts of the film, but even his comic timing cannot save the overall mess. The supporting cast is full of familiar faces from the previous films, including Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, Annie Ross as Vera Webster, and Robert Vaughn as Ross Webster. None of them get enough to do.
The film’s biggest failure is its pacing. At 125 minutes, it feels far longer than it has any right to be. The plot threads are introduced slowly, then abandoned just as quickly, leaving the audience confused about what is supposed to matter. The comedy does not land, the action scenes are generic, and the final act drags on with an oil spill that feels like a cheap stand-in for the real stakes of the story.
The film also cuts Margot Kidder’s role severely. Her Lois Lane is reduced to a brief appearance, reportedly because the producers were angry with her for criticizing how the Salkinds treated Donner, the director of the earlier films. This is a strange decision, since Lois is a central character in the Superman mythos, and her absence leaves a noticeable hole in the narrative.
The film was released in the United States on June 17, 1983. It grossed $80.2 million worldwide, which made it the weakest performer of the series. That figure tells the story of a film that failed to connect with audiences on any level.
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Release date | June 17, 1983 |
| Gross | $80.2 million |
Superman III is a mess. It tries to be a sequel that delivers on the promise of the earlier films, but it fails to deliver anything coherent. The comedy is weak, the action is generic, and the story is a jumble of half-finished ideas. It is the kind of film that makes you appreciate the earlier entries even more, simply by comparison.
This film earns a score of 3.1 out of 10.
Trailer, via Warner On Demand.
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