SpunkySelfTwitter
It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.
Brennan Camacho
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
tomr-28618
Easily one of the worst superhero movies and just one of the worst movies in general.This movie is hilariously bad. The effects look truly awful, the action scenes are funny and very silly, the story revolving around nuclear man was just stupid and again, funny. Somehow this movie has worse visual effects than the first even though it came out 9 years after.This film is watchable unlike some bad super hero movies because of how funny and stupid it is but it's truly a complete mess of a film and cannot be taken even the slightest bit seriously.
batmanfan200
This is the movie that killed the Superman franchise until 2007. The acting was just awful and the effects were not really good. I also think that the main villain (Nuclear Man) was just a carbon copy of Superman, except less interesting. The music, however, is a saving grace for this film, so I'd recommend getting the soundtrack to this movie instead of watching the actual movie. 1/10.
Ian
(Flash Review)This has a 3.6 IMDb score. That is very low. This movie wasn't that bad. Much better that Superman III. Sure the effects are below standards even for '87 but it was amusing and had all the components for a complete comic book story. Lois and Lex Luthor are back for the full movie and there is a corny and stereotypical villain with superpowers. There are some cheesy battles in the city and Superman, as a public service announcement storyline, declares he will rid the world of nuclear weapons. It was fun and I got what I expected, perhaps a notch below but it certainly wasn't terrible. And I finally finished off the Reeves Superman era!
Sean Lamberger
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.
