SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

Most blame the low-budget (yet still effective) production studio Cannon Films for SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE being such an awful movie, but it's instead the fault of Christopher Reeve for the very reason he did the movie in the first, second and third place...

Set in the mid-1980's during the Reagan Administration: when Russia had nukes aimed at America and vice versa... only here the superhero plot demands the kind of urgency where The Cold War's turned into an impending/existential threat... which it NEVER was... an idealistic and childish plot with schoolchildren calling for Superman to get rid of all the nuclear missiles, and Gene Hackman has returned as Lex Luthor, burdened with godawful teenager Jon Cryer as a geek-punk nephew, so it doesn't even feel like Hackman's involved: His goal to sell nukes to opposing countries while having somehow gained the scientific knowledge to create his very own superhero, Nuclear Man, something so corny even a TV-movie would avoid it...

Meanwhile, Margot Kidder has returned, and even flies around with Superman, but she's wedged in during a romance with b-villain Sam Wanamaker's rich girl daughter Muriel Hemingway, who tries her best only she's stuck in the wrong picture... So don't blame Cannon for a lead actor attempting to manipulate audiences into thinking The Cold War was actually red hot... and by 1987 that anti-nukes concept was tired and dated anyhow. Grade: F

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