Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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!

ryanskywalker-87402 My film knowledge is clearly wanting, because I found out only yesterday that Milton Keynes doubled Metropolis during the making of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - a fact which alone sums up the scope, ambition and grandeur of Sidney J Furies's nail in the Man of Steel's cinematic coffin for almost twenty years. Looking back, it's so apparent what different an age these Superman movies lived in, a 1980's where comic-book movies were seen as disposable fluff, certainly not keeping up with the tide of seminal graphic novels that only now is cinema truly catching up with. The Quest for Peace is very close to being an outright abomination, saved primarily by the goodwill radiating from the whole thing... saved not enough, mind you, to prevent rendering it as possibly the worst comic-book movie ever made, or certainly close to its pure nadir.You could cite a million problems. Story. Script. Production. Casting. It's pretty much got the lot, which in itself is an achievement. The low budget means Furie has to shoot in wholly unrepresentative locations that are so far away from the classy glamour of the first movie it's unreal, while ironically given Hollywood was on the verge of CGI breakthroughs around this time, the effects are the shoddiest of all four movies; the story starts in earnest fashion, with the interesting notion of Superman being called upon to interject in a nuclear arms race (though given, at this point, America & Russia were practically bowling buddies, it's not exactly razor sharp political commentary) utterly shattered when it descends (after a bizarre sequence where Supes throws ALL the nukes INTO THE SUN - surely that's a terrible idea, scientists?) into yet another dumb Lex Luthor farce of a plan and introduces the most laughable antagonist in comic-book history... NUCLEAR MAN! Oooooh! Run from his poodle perm! Hide from the daft lycra suit somehow created by the mad Frankenstein physics that creates him! Duck when he swipes you with his long, trimmed nails! I genuinely am not exaggerating about this guy... seriously, if he'd been accompanied throughout by Pepsi & Shirley, they would not have seemed out of place. In a way, he's brilliant for comedy - you try and fathom WHY he picks up the Statue of Liberty and decides to lob it down on a New York street. Good luck with that. He's just... amazingly awful, and once he turns up it just descends into the worst battle for supremacy you're ever likely to see on film. Poor Gene Hackman - he should have carved a comic-book legacy as Luthor, sadly he may just be remembered for all the wrong reasons when it comes to these films... I just hope he got paid well, frankly.Is it all bad? Well... yes. Almost. I feel most sorry for Christopher Reeve - what a way to exit his most iconic role, though admittedly he didn't necessarily know it'd be his last, but he must have known this was garbage. He does gamely well, in fairness, as charming and effortless as ever, and way above the material. Ditto Margot Kidder, reinstated properly here as Lois Lane, who gives possibly her sleekest & most assured performance in the role, again despite working with detritus (and having to share too much screen time with Mariel Hemingway's wet lettuce love rival). Those two just--just--make watching this worthwhile but only, truly, if you are a Superman completest. No, really.Superman IV has a lot to answer for, really. It--and the preceeding movie--meant very few movie makers in Hollywood took the superhero genre seriously for a long, long time and though Tim Burton's Batman would level the playing field a little more soon after, The Quest for Peace truly showed how not to treat Superman or his genre.

Uriah43 Although he is imprisoned, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) further demonstrates that there is no correction facility that can hold him as he breaks out once again and plots revenge on the man that put him there. To that end, he fiendishly combines Superman's DNA and nuclear fusion to create a superhuman being he calls "Nuclear Man" (Mark Pillow). Meanwhile, the newspaper known as the Daily Planet has been bought by a wealthy tabloid publisher named "David Warfield" (Sam Wanamaker) who promptly changes the journalistic format of the newspaper to one that specializes in cheap sensationalism. He also replaces the editor "Perry White" (Jackie Cooper) with his daughter "Lacy Warfield" (Mariel Hemingway) to solidify the new format. Interestingly enough, while "Lois Lane" (Margot Kidder) continues to harbor a deep infatuation for "Superman" (Christopher Reeve) Lacy develops a romantic interest in "Clark Kent" (also played by Christopher Reeve) instead. And this creates a unique problem in itself when Lois and Lacy agree have a double-date with both Superman and Clark Kent. Now, rather than reveal any more let me just state that I am perfectly aware that this particular film has been roundly condemned by a vast majority of critics and even had the dubious distinction of garnering two Golden Raspberry nominations: "Worst Supporting Actress" (Mariel Hemingway) and "Worst Visual Effects". Additionally, Esquire magazine ranked it at #40 of the worst 50 movies ever made. That's pretty bad. Even so, while I agree that the special effects could have used significant improvement, I disagree with the assessment concerning Mariel Hemingway's performance. For starters, I didn't think her performance was that bad and I certainly don't think it merited a Raspberry Award nomination. If anything, I thought her presence actually helped liven up the picture to a certain degree. Likewise, I also disagree with the overall evaluation of the film by Esquire magazine. Case in point, it was nominated for an International Fantasy Film Award in the category for "Best Film" and ranked #4 at the box office upon its release. So there you have it. In any case--and not that it means anything--I personally thought this movie was better than its predecessor. So, for all of the reasons just mentioned, I have rated this film accordingly. Slightly above average.

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.