It doesn't seem like they were even trying. At least this is only 90 minutes.

It starts out fine but turns into more of soap opera as it goes on. With a villain made from nuclear weapons who is actually called nuclear man. As well as Superman a playa. Who wants to date one woman as Superman and the other as Clark. While some of the effects are as weak as something from the 1950’s. Christopher Reeve deserved a better last outing as Superman.

Very bad. How the hell can the reporter (the daughter) breath in space..

Hitting a series low, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is all kinds of bad. When Superman unilaterally decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons he falls prey to Lex Luthor’s scheme to create Nuclear Man, a superhuman villain with all the same powers as Superman. Starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Mariel Hemingway, and Margot Kidder, the film has a solid cast that attempts to make the material work; but try as they might, they fail. The writing is just terrible, the tone is uneven, and the plot is full of holes. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is a poorly made film that lacks the fun and excitement that made the series so popular.

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, then known as Duckie from 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 and 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.