Superman 3 is probably the most reputationally fluid of all the Reeves-era Superman flicks. One and (to a lesser extent admittedly) Two are uncontested classics of the genre, Supergirl and Quest for Peace were seen as dogs when they were released and are seen as dogs now. But the third outing is where I think consensus breaks down. Some people hate it even more than Superman 4. Mad people, I suspect, gibbering loons who should not be allowed out of the house unsupervised but they are an important and influential constituency in modern affairs and we overlook their views at our peril.

Superman 3’s standing at any given moment really depends on the general public’s taste in superhero media and how tolerant they are feeling towards silliness. For this is, let us be very clear, a deeply silly film. Richard Lester, now fully in control and having banished the last vestigaes of Richard Donner’s weighty, epic solemnity is ready to give us his thesis statement on what Superman is. And his answer boils down to; “Superman is very silly”.

So, Lester decides that Superman should be funny. And, if you’re the Salkinds that doesn’t just mean getting a comic actor to join the cast. That means getting THE BIGGEST STAND UP COMIC IN AMERICA *PUFF CIGARS*.

Now, the Salkinds’ “bigger equals better” approach served them quite well in the past but here I think it came a serious cropper. Richard Pryor is, and always will be, on the Rushmore of American comedy legends but (heresy incoming) I don’t think he was a great comedic actor. He certainly isn’t in this movie, most of his schtick (and oh my Christ is there a lot of it) comes across really laboured and kinda leaden. There’s a couple of problems here. Firstly, Pryor isn’t performing his own material. He’s an actor performing someone else’s script. Second, I think the Salkinds expected Pryor to do what Bill Murray did in Ghostbusters and just do his own thing while treating the script with a kindly disregard. But here’s the thing: Richard Pryor loved Superman and treated the material with a respect that is admirable but not particularly funny. To be sure, there are parts here that I find humorous but that’s more a result of waging a war of attrition. Pryor gets a whopping half an hour of screentime, compared to around forty minutes for Superman. He is very much the deuteragonist. In fact, the very first shot of the movie is his face.

In my review of Superman I mentioned how I consider it to be the ultimate “eighties” movie but I think this might have it beat. Superman 3 opens with a black man applying for unemployment benefit and being denied because he kept getting fired for stealing and being incompetent, only for him to see an ad looking for computer programmers and immediately getting a stable and well paid job because gosh darn it the economy is just that good. That may be the most eighties thing I have ever seen.

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