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's a Generic Doomsday Villain

 * 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 the main antagonists from Superman III, he is never straight from the comics in the first place as mentioned in WHAGDV# 1.
 * 4) He acts like a humanoid robot with a misunderstood motivation to cause trouble.
 * 5) 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.
 * 6) 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.
 * 7) He feels like a poor rip-off of one of Spider-Man's villain Electro or a replacement for Superman villains, Parasite and even Brainiac. Also, he even looks like a prototype version of a female Superman villain, Livewire from the animated series of the same name.
 * 8) His costume looks laughable and too goofy to be a parody as it came straight from those rejected WWF wrestling clothes.
 * 9) 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.
 * 10) Nuclear Man can easily be compared to the WFC Trilogy counterpart of Nemesis Prime. Both are generic doomsday villains, both were created by another villain (Nuclear Man was created by Lex Luthor and Nemesis was created by Unicron.), both have their names consist of two words, both of their names start with the letter "n", and both of their defeats are quite bad. The only differences are that Nuclear Man is a Kryptonian organic and that Nemesis Prime is a Cybertronian Robot and that Nemesis Prime is the future self of the protagonist while Nuclear Man isn't.
 * 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 also a nuclear missile.

The Only Redeeming Quality

 * 1) Mark Pillow did an okay job portraying him.