Welcome Back, Fellow Readers!
With the arrival of Ant-Man in theaters and the arrival of Kang, I thought I would do as I did many blogs ago, where I wrote about underrated movie villains and television villains. I figure this time; I would do an opinion piece (aren’t they all) about villains who have either changed for the worse or failed to live up to expectations.
Again I stress these are opinions, and I know some will find two of the villains on this list to be the greatest of all time, and maybe they were, but they have faltered in their depictions.
Again… Warning.
Kang Of Okaymania
He who remains: Kang. His first appearance in the MCU took place in the series Loki which dealt with the shattering of the main timeline letting the multiverse take effect. The buildup to the character’s reveal is solid. Loki’s story throughout is an interesting one, given the character bounced back and forth between good and bad more than the evil princess did in once upon a time, but I digress.
The Kang we meet in Loki is an almost whimsical creature who has done many things and seen many things and many Kangs. He speaks on this in an excellently acted scene where his monologue about what the future could hold is a scene that has yet to be surpassed in the movies or the other shows since.
But with his arrival in Ant-Man, we get a very different Kang. He hails himself as a conqueror but is a simple Kang. He uses technology to control and is trapped in the Quantum realm. I will not spoil Ant-Man for you here, but let’s say. The conqueror is conquered and brought down in a fistfight with a man. This would be okay if he happened to be outsmarted by Ant-Man, a criminal whose skill has been underutilized since the first Ant-Man, but that’s a different matter.
Our next Thanos-level threat is defeated without much trouble, without a blink of sacrifice. He is lowered down to a street-level thug that anyone could beat. This, too, might be because the film’s story is lacking. The main character isn’t Ant-Man, and Kang spends most of his time dealing with The original Wasp. It’s a movie you see because it introduces Kang to the films.
This Kang is neither clever nor accomplished. Yes, he has conquered the realm, but as hokey as the people in the Quantum real are, Mr. Rogers could conquer it. The end credits conclude, showing millions of Kangs all debating and talking, but I am not impressed if this is what we have to look forward to.
Darth Vader: A.K.A The Sith Who Always Loses
In the original films, Vader was a menacing force. In many scenes, we see his followers recoil at his mere sight. He has respect or their fear, but he is their Lord, the Commander—the face of the Sith and the controlling force of the empire.
Now there is a lot of Star Wars media, and like the comics, different writers mean different ways the powers are used, but that is not the problem for his character. The problem with Darth Vader is he constantly gets his butt whooped by everyone. Ashoka, Kenobi, in every video game where you fight him, he is beaten.
The biggest travesty I’ve seen of his character is in the show Kenobi which is terrible, but beyond that, there are two face-offs with the character, not counting the flashback. Both times, Darth Vader is practically beaten, and in the last fight, he is beaten severely. For a character who is all-powerful, he sure does get beat a lot. What fear does any Jedi have of Darth Vader if he is beaten every time someone fights him? To fix this in Kenobi, Vader should have won the last fight. He should have tarnished Kenobi and caused him to hide, but that won’t happen cause we need fourteen more years of Kenobi hiding in the desert doing secret missions and never being found.
Homelander: Or Fake Superman
Homelander is the leader of the group named the Seven, a play on the Justice League. The series makes fun of all superheroes. But Homelander is a villain who bounces back and forth being moments of Victimhood and wanting to murder everyone yet never actually doing it. He is the simp of the villain world.
In the first season, we get a great scene where he doesn’t save anyone on the airplane. They are lost, he says. He leaves them all to die. This is an excellent scene in which we never get another one. It always leans into him, crying or imagining killing a group of people. He meets characters he can destroy in a minute but never does so cause the story doesn’t call for it. We need the boys to survive as the show is all about them.
And speaking of the boys. In their hatred of the Seven in the first season, they manage to kill one or two, but after season one they fill the show with filler and make characters weaker.
At least when Superman goes evil — He is a force when written right.
I hope this new season gives the character a proper role. He is a character who wants to do evil things and the duality of wanting to be loved by everyone as he has never been loved.
