Word: lex
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...through his castoff, pregnant girlfriend, who has taken refuge under Arnie's mostly paternal wing. Arnie cannot keep faith with the past without summoning up its burdens. These arrive one day in the form of a familiar family hunting for a dream house along the gulf: Lex Graham, the ambitious colleague who undermined Arnie at the university; Lex's sleek wife, who is eager to resume the affair she and Arnie once conducted; and Lex's cherished daughter, a high school belle who has reached just the right age to have her head turned by Arnie...
...felled moments later by a mysterious snakebite. But such effects are fitted so neatly into place, their significance so finely chiseled, that one almost hears the click of the craftsman's tool. As a result, the energies of Spencer's narrative remain muted, her conclusion equivocal. Even Lex, from whom violence might have been expected (he once pointed a pistol at a triumphant Arnie on campus), drifts off in a paralysis of frustration and despair. The final chapters echo with questions like those Arnie addresses to the Buddha...
...requisite demonstration of power by the three meanies, who soon discover they have strength equal to that of Superman. At the White House they receive an unconditional surrender from a cowering President (who looks alarmingly like Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee), and aided by the enterprising earth-bound villian, Lex Luthor, they set out to find the only being standing between them and a happy reign of pain and degredation...
...with their half-finished sentences and frustrated glances, they succeed parodying the struggle for personal fulfillment after the fall from innocence. Of the other actors, only Gene Hackman merits particular mention for his subdued portrayal of indefatigable Lex Luthor, the man who for his part in the subjugation of the world "only wants a little beachfront property--the continent of Australia...
...story could be floated in about four comic-strip balloons. Lex Luthor (an agreeably tuned-down Gene Hackman only briefly abetted by Ned Beatty) is still egocentrically on hand. But he is pretty much a bench warmer for the forces of darkness. The heavyweight heavies now are Zod, Ursa and Non (an unrecognizable Terence Stamp, Sarah Douglas and Jack O'Halloran), whom experts in yesterday's trivia will recall as the trio of traitors the good folks of Krypton compressed to the proportions of a flat rock and sent skimming over the ocean of space at the beginning...