The Most Pointless Characters In Batman V Superman

To filmgoers unfamiliar with the comics, Lex Luthor's slender assistant Mercy Graves (played by model and actress Tao Okamoto of Hannibal and The Wolverine fame) may not seem all that important. She only surfaces at a few moments during the movie, and doesn't have much to do besides look mysterious (and receive a rather odd compliment from Bruce Wayne regarding her shoes). It's a shame, because since making her debut in Superman: The Animated Series, Mercy has more than demonstrated her worth as a badass character, making key contributions to a number of storylines while evolving from an assassin in a chauffeur's uniform to a blonde would-be hero to an Asian-American LexCorp executive (comics are complicated). None of that history amounts to much in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and aside from including her as an inside nod to comics fans, director Zack Snyder really had no reason to work the character into the story. Imagine the movie without Mercy, and what do you see? Yep—it's pretty much the same.

We love Laurence Fishburne, and casting him as Clark and Lois' boss at the Daily Planet was an inspired stroke in Man of Steel. But there's really no room for Perry White in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and by awkwardly shoehorning in a few scenes of the editor hollering at his reporters for story coverage and cheaper expense reports, Snyder really only underscores how much better Marvel's always been at depicting the day-to-day lives of its heroes. That being said, we definitely aren't asking for a Superman movie that leaves out Perry or the Planet—we'd just rather see a storyline that strikes a better balance between identifiably human emotional stakes and all-out action mayhem.

This one hurts. Wonder Woman's big-screen arrival is long overdue, and Gal Gadot seems to have the right combination of glamour and grit for the role, but her storyline in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is so tacked-on and superfluous that she might as well have not even been there. For most of the movie, she doesn't do much more than flit around making eyes at Bruce Wayne, and when she finally does make her way into battle, she actually sort of ends up making things worse. Aside from the admitted wow factor of finally seeing Wonder Woman in a live-action film for the first time, there isn't much reason for her to be here besides acting as a cheap lead-in for the Justice League movie, and she deserves better treatment.

In Man of Steel, Superman's Kryptonian dad reached out to his son from beyond the grave as an interactive hologram. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice gives Superman a different sort of posthumous powwow with his adopted Earth dad, Jonathan Kent, who appears as a vision while our hero is sulking through a long walk in the icy wilderness. Seeing Kevin Costner again made us happy enough to stop wondering why Superman would need to bother wearing a winter coat, but things quickly go downhill as soon as Pa Kent opens his mouth. Instead of delivering a rousing speech about how the people of Earth need him, he tells the story of the time he accidentally flooded his neighbor's farm. Superman's gone into self-imposed exile so many times that the audience no longer worries whether he'll return, so why even bother including this scene? Here's hoping the paycheck at least covered a few mortgage payments for Costner.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice definitely has its moments (and is currently crying all the way to the bank in spite of some pretty miserable reviews), but it's far from a perfect film. Keep a Kryptonite scalpel handy as we go through the characters who should've been cut out of Dawn of Justice in order to make the film better.