Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Cast: Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway, Hart Bochner, Peter O’Toole
Have I Seen it Before: During a summer day in 1997 I went to an Albertsons, got a dozen pieces of fried chicken, and rented all five of the Super-movies for ten dollars. It was a simpler time. They had good chicken.
Did I Like It: I remembered shockingly little of the film, aside from the fact that Christopher Reeve is resolutely not in it, aside from one photograph. I’d say his wisdom was on track avoiding the movie, but then he went ahead and got involved with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), but that’s a discussion for a different time. His conspicuous, awkward absence from the entirety of the film automatically hamstrings the affair. Even if the other elements of the film had been immaculate, there would be an illegitimacy to the whole thing without he who first made us believe a man could fly.
Honestly, it’s reputation is probably unearned, and sort of like Superman III (1983), the film was reviled in its time, but is the beneficiary of comparisons with the last film in the Reeve-series.
Sure, it is a little hung up with painting Kara Zor-El (Slater) as a doe-eyed innocent in the mold of a Disney movie, where her cousin would always seem like he was in control of the situation, even, when he was pretending to be Clark Kent. And yet, somehow and inexplicably, there is no transition from arriving on Earth to being Supergirl fully-formed.
Great (O’Toole) and mostly okay actors (Dunaway) are clearly slumming their way through a script so weighed down by preposterous sci-fi talk that the story, such as it is, even managed to lose me in the early minutes.
There is plenty to complain about in the film. The Salkinds display once again that the more direct control they have over the fate of the super-franchise, the more disappointing things become. But, the movie is a real movie, and the money spent makes its way to the screen. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one of the few super-scores that doesn’t feel the need to slavishly worship at the altar of John Williams. For several sustained moments, I do believe a girl can fly. And if that weren’t enough, I was legitimately craving Popeye’s Chicken after the run time. If that doesn’t make the film at least a partial success, I don’t know what would.