Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:DocColress/The Great Big Examples Suggestion Topic 3: Snake Eater/reply (13)

So after re-watching Man of Steel (Which I feel is sort of flawed, but still a good movie that gets WAY too much hate, but that's off-topic, ha ha), I've been thinking back to the past Superman films I've watched and I believe I've found an example: Lex Luthor, but only in Superman Returns as I remember him being hammy, but still incredibly evil and played up as overall darker and creepier by Kevin Spacey while his Gene Hackman portrayal was much more comedic and campy. Haven't seen the movie in years, but after looking up the movie and refreshing my memory I feel I can make a solid case for him.

Who is Lex Luthor and what does he do?: Lex Luthor is pretty much THE guy we all think about when Superman comes to mind (Especially in the films, since he's usually the villain or at least involved in them more often than not!), and is usually portrayed as a smooth, calculating, and ruthless Magnificent Bastard with some redeeming qualities to his name. In Superman Returns and to my knowledge in Richard Donner's movies, he isn't redeemable in the slightest. He's a cruel, money-hungry egomaniac who puts billions of lives in danger for the sake of profiting off real-estate. After kidnapping Lois Lane and her child, Lex reveals to them that he is going to create an enormous Kryptonite landmass in the ocean that would displace other continental landmasses which would kill billions of innocent people while he would force survivors to pay large sums of money to live on "Lexland", knowing full and well of the consequences which means that he's not a Mike Nelson, Destroyer of World type villain. Whenever Superman tries to stop him, he is weakened by the kryptonite and ruthlessly tortured by Lex who takes the moment to humiliate him and beat him to a bloody pulp for putting him in prison, even letting his henchmen in on the fun before burying a shard of Krytponite in his back and leaving him to drown. This combined with his deeds in the campier Donner films (Causing enormous earthquakes by launching missles into the San Andreas Fault if memory serves, as well as allying with the genocidal General Zod) makes him one evil son of a bitch.

Is he heinous by the standards of the story?: You don't get much more heinous than trying to kill billions for profit and humiliating your nemesis in an excruciatingly painful way. While Kevin Spacey still plays up Luthor's hamminess with even a few comedic moments, he's still over-all treated as a very serious threat and is looked at as a monstrous madman by others. Hell, his own assistant Kitty ends up dumping the rest of the Kryptonite crystals Lex had stowed away for what I think were Lexland backups and lying about how they disappeared, meaning that she seems to be disgusted by him.

Any Freudian excuse or sympathetic qualities?: While his hate for Superman comes from having his plans foiled in past endeavours, the fact that even in his campier Gene Hackman portrayal where he was still willing to kill millions show that Superman's presence didn't drive him over the edge and he was evil from the start. As for his relationship with his henchmen, I don't remember if he was a flat-out "Bad" Boss (Save for a moment where he put Kitty's life in danger to distract Superman in one scene) but he wasn't a good one either, and while he did marry an elderly widow it's made clear that he just wanted her fortune when she died.

Verdict?: I feel he's an easy qualifier, though I do wonder if his sillier portrayal would hurt his chances due to earlier movies. If they don't, I feel he's easily the most monstrous portrayal of Luthor to my knowledge (Haven't watched any of the animated films, and while comics Luthor is still bad, he seems to be an inconsistent case there as discussed in his entry in the DC section).