The first line of my review of Full Frontal said that the film was "so bad it's hard to beleive." I wish I had saved that for this movie. The idea is so wrong it never, ever should have got past a story treatment somebody should have thrown in the garbage can.
Okay, it does make sense on a basic level that for the third Superman film they would want to go for a lighter tone, as the first couple films were so serious and "big". But the way they did went horribly wrong. I can see the meeting between the producers and the studio execs. "Hey, Richard Pryor is really popular, and Superman is really popular. If we just put them in the same film, it's be really, really popular!"
No, it just means the movie fails twice. It's not a good comic vehicle for Pyror, and it's not a good Superman movie. The scenes with Pryor fail because the comedians best matieral involves social satire, this film gives him only slapstick. The Superman scenes fail beacuse Richard Lester adopts such a campy, redicoulous tone that you can't get involved with the story or care very much what happens, as good as Christopher Reeve is, as usual.
The premise involves Pryor, as Gus Gorman, an out of work loser who discovers that he is a computer genious, and can manipulate computers to do what ever we want (this is unintentioally funny, as the film is from the 80's, and the premitive computers do things we can't do with today's technology). He gets caught by mean billioanre Ross Webster (Robert Vaugn) manipulatibg his paycheck, so Webster blachmails Gorman into programming a US Weather satilite to change cause a tornoado in Columbia. Meanwhile, Clark Kent returns to his home town of Smallville to attend his class reunion, where he meets his high school crush (Annette O'Toole, who is very good). Later, Superman gets turned into an evil version of himself because of some phony Kryptonite Gorman developed.
To say that the movie is not funny is an understatement. The slapstick tone that Lester uses is completley inappropraite for this material. I found only one seen intentioally funny, the scene where Gorman impersonates an Army General (I don't know why, I just did). Often I laughed at the fact that it was intended to be funny. The movie is kind of pathetic in this way. Often I literally was amazed at how misconcieved some scenes were.
The Superman story is more interesting, but the Henny Youngman tone kills any chance of suspense. I actually did buy the relationship between Reeve and O'Toole. This movie is more proof as to just how good Reeve is- he plays three parts, Clark Kent, the good Superman, and the bad Superman, masterfully.
All in all, this is a movie that never should have been made. Richard Lester is a fine director, but heis just wrong for this material. The first movie was great, the second was okay, this is awful. I wonder what part four will behold.
Superman III (1983)