10 Dumbest Villains In Movie History
1. Lex Luthor - Superman I (1978) & II (1980) & Superman Returns (2006)
It's possible that never in the history of genre cinema has one super-villain been as poorly served by an adaptation to film as Alexander Joseph Luthor. Skipping the horror show that is Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, we're looking at Gene Hackman's Luthor, and Kevin Spacey's variant on the same character in Bryan Singer's excellent sequel to the first two classic films.
The Luthor from the comics is a man of uncommon genius and ambition: a polymath with vast wealth and multifarious business interests who could be the most important and valuable man in the world were it not for his negative obsession with Superman. At one point, he's voted in as President Of The United States. In Donner's movie adaptation, however, Luthor is a wisecracking villain with a permanent grin, who acts more like a used car salesman than a genius mastermind. His great and brilliant plan, the dramatic engine thats supposed to drive the narrative, is to divert a nuclear warhead to the San Andreas fault, causing earthquakes that drop California into the sea and render his newly-purchased Nevada desert property highly desirable beachfront as the new Pacific coastline emerges. Yes, Lex Luthor, criminal genius and potential ruler of the world, is a sociopathic real estate mogul. How exactly this scheme would work without irradiating vast chunks of his precious desert investment, or how long it would take for the US economy to recover to the point where redevelopment or tourism was even possible, or how he'd retain ownership of the new beachfront property in the event of such a nationwide cataclysm is an utter mystery.
It gets worse. His role in Superman II, a bit part which amounts to a glorified cameo, is to hand Superman to his Kryptonian enemies in exchange for Australia. In Superman Returns, Lex is the same old get-rich-quick chancer, just with a far more vicious streak and a seriously bitter grudge against Superman. His plot here is to use Kryptonian crystal technology filched from Superman's Arctic fortress to grow a new continent in the Atlantic which will cause sea levels to rise dramatically, killing billions of people and leaving his own barren rock one of the only major land masses not underwater. Again, how he intended to monetise this during his own lifetime in a worldwide cataclysm and keep himself from being jailed or killed by a vengeful world populace remains a mystery.
Both Hackman and Spacey's Luthors surrounded themselves with even dumber henchmen with no special skills or abilities and vacuous female sidekicks. But it's not their allies: it's their plans that are their downfalls. Casually sociopathic, poorly thought out, and fundamentally incredibly unsound, it's likely that Stewie from Family Guy has conceived better schemes to accrue power and vast wealth, and is probably better mentally equipped to enact them.
The Machiavellian genius Lex Luthor from the comics would euthanise these two embarrassingly dumb clones within seconds of meeting them, probably with a death ray he cobbled together from paperclips and chewing gum wrappers in a moment of boredom.
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Who's the dumbest villain you've ever seen in a movie? Tell us all about why they're so stupid in the comments...