Too much of everything

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Not as bad as the worst parts of the 3rd film but not as good as its best part either. It's just plainly bad, uninteresting and boring and the actors seem to know that too. Continuity or anything related to that is abandoned yet its silliness and sweetness doesn't make you hate it, just forget about it.

It was nice seeing most of the original cast (from 1978) reprise their roles: Gene Hackman - Lex Luthor; Jackie Cooper - Perry White; Marc McClure - Jimmy Olsen; Margot Kidder - Lois Lane; and of course Christopher Reeve - Superman. This was to be their final outings in their respective roles in this iteration of Superman.Unfortunately, their presence alone was not enough to boost this movie both in story and at the box office. The Salkinds were no longer in charge. Instead, Golan-Globus and the Cannon Group were brought on to get this off the ground.The premise of this movie was a worthy one for our beloved hero: Superman wants to rid the world of nukes and his traditional arch-nemesis Lex Luthor had other plans to prevent that. Unfortunately, the Cannon Group and their writers couldn't make it interesting enough to draw audiences.While I enjoyed many of the flicks put on by the (now defunct) Cannon Group, it was apparent that superheroes and the Superman franchise were not their forte'. "Low budget" doesn't always equal low quality, but for this movie, unfortunately, the results were less-than-stellar.From what I gather, the Cannon Group was already in financial trouble when they took on the reins of the Superman series. This was a chance for them to start the road to recovery and make up for Superman III's dismal performance. They failed. Cannon continued their downward spiral and Superman IV did much worse than III.This was truly the end of the an era for Christopher Reeve's iteration of Superman, his fellow players who started in it and the original production company. While it was inevitable that the players for this iteration would no longer be playing those roles (as the years went by), it was sad to see their finale in these roles in this less- than-desirable chapter.

It's a little amazing, really, how quickly the original Superman franchise eroded into bad comedy. This being the ground floor of that descent, it bears little similarity to the original film beyond several key casting choices and a spit curl. Christopher Reeve returns as the title character, of course, with Margot Kidder suffering an expanded role and Gene Hackman back from a one-film exile to ham it up once again as a clueless, underwhelming Lex Luthor. Filling the Richard Pryor "why?!" role from the previous film is Jon Cryer, better known as Duckie in Pretty in Pink, who plays some sort of pointless, meandering male twist on the Valley Girl stereotype that was rolling through culture at the time. I'm still not entirely sure why he was elbowed into the plot. This isn't aggressively bad like Superman III, it's just hopelessly inept. In fact, the core of the story has a lot of potential: Superman, inspired by a letter from a young boy, destroys the world's nuclear armaments and discovers that some problems can't be solved quite so easily. It sputters and fails right on the launchpad, though, and soon falls back on a muscle-flexing brawl with some generic evil menace to solve the problem. Its grasp on physics, and reality as a whole, is so loose it's almost adorable. I'd pat my four-year-old son on the head and smile if he suggested we move the moon around to keep the sun out of his eyes, but for this film that's a legitimate solution. To say its answers make any sense would be an insult to sense itself. The whole thing plays like an easy answer to a complex problem, from the story to the editing to the acting to the effects work. These older superhero movies don't hold up to the rigors of time as a whole, but Superman IV looks particularly bad in a modern setting. Even the hero's indistinguishable costume seems cut-rate and fake, like they'd forgotten to commission a wardrobe department until the night before production. Head-shakingly pointless and dull, this film only seems to exist to kill time. Which, thankfully, it doesn't demand in great quantities. While the original cut came in at over two hours, some greedy last-minute cuts trimmed it down to a slim ninety minutes. Why the late edits? To ensure a few more showings each day at theaters nationwide. Of course.

This movie is an insult and disrespectful to Superman, to the fans, it's even disrespectful to Superman III, which wasn't that good of a movie to begin with, but even that was better than this Z-grade, nonsensical, juvenile drivel.The plot ridiculously has Superman ridding the world of all nuclear weapons, while Lex Luthor is cooking up a Nuclear Man (who looks like the singer in some awful hair metal band) of his own to take down Superman once and for all. We learn, in the course of the film, that Nuclear Man has no power at all when the sun doesn't shine on him, so, he obviously doesn't come across as being very intimidating, unless one gets radiation poisoning from him. Or, scratched by his manicured talons.The effects are rock bottom, bottom of the barrel, and they are reused multiple times throughout, which only reiterates their ineptitude. Colour shifts, and changes in tone only make the poor film stock (due to the film's slashed budget) even more obvious. The photography itself is flat, centred, and dull, it never rises above looking like a television commercial.A problem this series had was coming up with worthwhile villains. Lex Luthor, and especially General Zod, were wonderful, worthy opponents in the first two films. In part 3, we had Robert Vaughn and Richard Pryor fumbling about. Here in part 4, we have a reject from a bad hair metal band, with Gene Hackman's dubbed voice, fumbling through poorly choreographed fight scenes with Superman.I give this film a 2/ 10, just for the fact that Christopher Reeve still puts in a good performance, unlike some other actors who, by the fourth go round, would just be phoning it in.