Wilderness

Despite his limited screentime, I’ve got three main takeaways about him, all of which I think apply to Luthor and his other employees as a whole:

His job is simple, cruel and effective. Lex’s pocket dimension prison is a sinister masterclass in minimalism already — the cells are seemingly constructed from normal glass, but there’s nowhere for anyone who escapes to go but down into the antiproton river, so nobody bothers to try and escape. But they’re clearly not designed to hold metahuman prisoners: Rex Mason can turn into a gas at will, so there’s nothing physically stopping him from just breaking out and escaping of his own accord.

That’s where Goatee Guy comes in, wielding the soft power that can contain Rex when hard power can’t. If Rex tries anything that isn’t part of Lex’s plan, Goatee Guy has been instructed to murder Rex’s infant son Joey in front of him. Rex is a good-natured person who would never sacrifice his son for his own survival, so this threat is just a good a deterrent as kryptonite is for Superman.

This guy knows it’s effective, and he’s real smug about it. I mean, look at him. He’s forcibly waving the chubby arm of his sobbing baby victim, a cruel smirk plastered across his face. He knows that Rex won’t stop him from acting like a dick, so he might as well taunt the poor sap over how vulnerable his squishy lil baby is.

This guy is unbelievably, undeniably screwed, and he doesn’t even realize it. Here’s the thing: holding Rex’s son hostage is a tremendously effective piece of leverage to hold over Metamorpho. It is also the only piece of leverage that they have over Metamorpho. Luthorcorp has no way of containing Rex, no way to kill him or even nullify his powers, because if they did have a way to do that, they would be using it. Goatee Guy doesn’t realize it, but there are only three possible ways this situation shakes out:

Rex Mason doesn’t try to escape. The threat works, everything’s fine for Team Luthor

Rex Mason does try to escape, and Goatee Guy fails to immediately kill Joey. Leverage is only effective when it’s being used; Rex or Superman proceed to save the baby, and now Luthorcorp has no leverage at all against those two. The plan fails, and Lex probably takes his anger out on any employees that failed to stop the escape (starting with Goatee Guy)

Rex Mason does try to escape, and Goatee Guy immediately kills Joey. Now they’ve got no leverage to hold against Metamorpho, and a man who can turn his body into acid and poison is now loose in the pocket universe with nothing to lose. Goatee Guy inevitably dies horribly, an angry Metamorpho probably helps Superman escape, and the plan fails

Goatee Guy might feel real smug about his “kill the baby” job, but the only situation where he survives unscathed is the one where nobody even tries to push back against him. He holds a lot of soft power in the prison, but that soft power evaporates if he actually needs to use it: he’s a gun loaded with a single bullet, and if he fires it the only person guaranteed to die is himself.

I think this is a good example of Lex Luthor’s fatal flaw in this movie. He wields incredible soft power through slick words and propaganda, but he’s so confident that he’s plotted out every possible angle that he can’t anticipate that there are angles he hasn’t plotted out yet. This is a real problem for him: Lex might be a genius, but he also cannot improvise to save his life.

He programmed Ultraman with 2500+ different fighting moves to counter Superman, but apparently not a single one of those was designed to anticipate Superman having an ally in a fight, and he seemingly never bothered training Ultraman how to fight without being fed instructions at every step. He tried to divide Superman’s attention between Metropolis and Jarhanpur, and didn’t even consider the possibility that other superheroes would be willing to help save innocent people. His plan gets unraveled by the ditsy girlfriend who outschemed him for months, his abrupt murder of Mali radicalized Rex Mason into helping Superman escape, and Lex has the entire city of Metropolis under surveillance and yet still can’t figure out that Clark Kent is Superman. Lex’s plan is to move fast, break things, and assume that nobody will fight back in a way he hasn’t expected: the moment somebody does anything he didn’t anticipate, the plan begins to dissolve until there’s nothing left.

Little rotom tablet baby with unrestricted internet access

Maleficent is certainly someone you wouldn’t want at a party, but she’s also someone powerful enough that only a fool would ever dare treat her with such blatant disrespect. The only way the King and Queen could possibly have gotten away with not inviting Maleficent was to not invite any of the fairies at all; inviting the other fairies and excluding her is explicitly taking sides in the conflict between the fairy factions.

Which means they made themselves her sworn enemies, and she responded by treating them as such from then on. If you actually get into analyzing the social dynamics of the scene, it’s very clear that Maleficent was willing to show mercy at first by giving the King and Queen a chance to apologize for their disrespect to her. She doesn’t curse Aurora until after she gives them that chance and they throw it back in her face with further disrespect.