Batman V Superman: Ranking Every Movie From Worst To Best

15. Superman III

Superman III opens with an extended Rube Goldberg comedy routine, where a hot lady in a dress causes all sorts of disasters, like a man bumping into a lamppost and walking penguin toys setting on fire and a blind man accidentally painting a road. Superman turns up at one point to save a guy from drowning in a car and at the end Clark Kent pies the first guy who walked into a lamppost in the face. The film may not be as comedic as the inclusion of Richard Pryor may suggest, but boy is its tone off. Every Superman movie since II has fell victim to trying to stuff too many variables in, but none that made it to release (read up on Superman Flyby) are as convoluted as Superman III. Even with main plot it's jumbled; you have Clark returning to Smallville and romancing Lana Lang, Jimmy Olsen trying to prove himself as a photographer and Richard Pryor's inexplicable computer genius becoming a stooge for Robert Vaughn's Lex Luthor replacement, whose schemes feel directly lifted out of Bond (which, interestingly, is much closer to the latter-day Luthor than the Silver Age property mogul we saw of Gene Hackman in the first two films). The big hook is the idea of Superman turning bad (on that note, the personality of Supes in Man Of Steel is pretty much this "evil" Superman), which amounts to making the Leaning Tower of Pisa straight and getting drunk. Boo you Superman. Boo you. Reeve can't carry this side of the character well, and it's resolved in the most flippant way. Richard Lester clearly didn't care much about doing Superman justice, but could have at least tried to care about the film itself?