Word: motiveless
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...discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism. Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity...
...actors from tearing into their roles with the black comic gusto that Glenn Close and John Malkovich brought to their feverish performances in Dangerous Liaisons last year. But besides spoiling the fun, this approach / blurs the work's value as a cautionary tale, capable of reminding us that motiveless malignity is a potent force in every age and one that not even Freud -- let alone humanistically inclined moviemakers -- can explain away...
...rock score with the volume turned up to brain-damage level; the incomprehensible plot, this time involving a series of robberies linked to an arms-smuggling scheme (don't ask how or why); the music-video montages of the good life in Beverly Hills alternating with sudden descents into motiveless and entirely humorless violence; the none-too-subtle maneuverings to bring Murphy into contact with variously dim figures who can be run over by his motor mouth; the police colleague-foils, who, besides Reinhold, include John Ashton and Ronny Cox and whose chief function is to shake their heads bemusedly...
...dictionary defines rape as an "outrageous violation" and a victim as "someone badly used." It is to Olsen's great credit that, in a strangely hypnotic, grieving book, he provides these phrases with a human dimension. "Motiveless malignity" is a fine phrase in Othello; in contemporary life, evil generally has a reason, however perverted. Olsen has tracked it to its source. -By J.D. Reed
...Joseph Papp's first summer offering will soon perceive that Kevin Kline does not fit that description. It is not a question of some malformation of body à la Elephant Man, it is a question of a cancerously aberrant soul. Richard III lies somewhere between Iago, with his "motiveless malignity," and Macbeth, who has "supp'd full of horrors" in his naked, unbridled lust for power...