Word: luthor
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...owners or the demands of the market. His originally nameless father on Krypton, for example, became Jor-L, then Jor-El (and eventually Marlon Brando). His employer in Metropolis, before it was the Daily Planet, was the Daily Star and then the Evening News. His Luciferian arch-enemy Luthor, the mad scientist who wants to conquer the world, once had red hair, then became bald, then reacquired red hair; in the movies he was played as a buffoon, but now he has turned into a reasonably sane but incurably wicked conglomerate tycoon. Superman is also vulnerable to Kryptonite, the stuff...
...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...
...passed through many hands. The early scenes in Krypton and Kansas, for instance, are in dead earnest, with a strong overlay of spiritualism and Christian symbolism. The tone shifts abruptly when the action moves to Metropolis, which, along with evil, abounds with sight gags and fast back chat. Luthor adds still another tone, that of high camp, somewhat reminiscent of TV's old Batman serial. On their own, the Luthor scenes are funny, but they almost seem to have been brought in by mistake from another movie...