Nuclear Man (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace)



Nuclear Man is the secondary antagonist of mh:awfulmovies:Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Why He Sucks

 * 1) Nuclear Man has no reason to exist even though he was never in the comics in the first place. But, he is uninteresting in this movie, as he feels like a generic plot device who doesn't do much more than just act as a glorified henchman for Superman's archenemy, Lex Luthor.
 * 2) The character is poorly written and not even based on the comics.
 * 3) Just like Ross and Vera Webster from Superman III, he is never straight from the comics in the first place as mentioned in WHS# 1.
 * 4) He acts like a humanoid robot with a misunderstood motivation to cause trouble.
 * 5) His actor, Mark Pillow, does a weak job portraying him.
 * 6) His weakness itself is very pathetic and contradicts itself. As while he is weak while isolated from the Sun, there are several scenes where he is indoors without the sunlight.
 * 7) He provides a lot of awful dialogue, such as "I am the father now!" and "If you will not tell, I will hurt people". A lot of his dialogue ties into the deleted scenes involving a failed prototype of Nuclear Man, making his dialogue in the end product just weird and nonsensical.
 * 8) He is like a bad rip-off of Spider-Man villain Electro or a replacement for Superman villains, Parasite and even Brainiac. Also, he looks like a prototype version of a female Superman villain, Livewire from the animated series of the same name.
 * 9) His costume looks laughable and too goofy.
 * 10) He barely has any goal, besides attacking Superman and trying to kidnap Lacy Warfield, the latter of which he apparently does just because he sees her on the cover of a magazine and finds her attractive (this again made more sense with the deleted scenes including proto-Nuclear Man, albeit not a whole lot more). This makes him aimless.
 * 11) His defeat is laughably bad, with Superman dropping him into the cooling tower of a nuclear plant, and this somehow destroying him.
 * 12) Even more laughable is how originally defeated Superman. He scratched Superman's neck with his giant, golden fingernails. No, really.
 * 13) In the comic adaptation, his other powers are just silly and ridiculous as he transforms himself into a giant, and a nuclear missile.