Well, the wait has been an excruciatingly long one, but this week it’s finally over – The Dark Knight, our long-awaited second installment in the head-and-shoulders best superhero franchise currently running, is here at last.

With it, of course, comes the most talked-about performance of the year: Heath Ledger, in one of his final film roles, as The Joker. From everything I’ve seen and heard thus far – and, man, has it been a lot – this is a performance that’s going to get talked about whenever people talk about the greatest bad guys in movie history, so this week I thought I’d take a look back at some other big-name actors who were at their best playing the worst of the worst.

Sir Laurence Olivier as Dr. Christian Szell, Marathon Man

Alright a knight, an Oscar-winner, and the best-known Shakespearean actor on the planet, the ever-dignified Olivier decided to add another title to his resume in 1977: scary-ass mofo. His ex-death camp doctor Christian Szell wasn’t even the main villain in William Goldman’s espionage thriller Marathon Man, but that didn’t stop him from handily stealing the show – the scene in which he tortures Dustin Hoffman’s in-over-his-head hero with a variety of cringe-inducing dental implements has become one of the best remembered squirm sequences in film history, and rightly so.
Olivier earned one of his many Academy Award nominations for the role, reportedly inspired by real-life Nazi torturer Josef Mengele, and also placed the innocent-seeming question, “Is it safe?” up there with the most terrifying lines ever uttered in the movies.

Henry Fonda as Frank, Once Upon a Time in the West

In the 30s, he played a fresh-faced Abe Lincoln. In the 40s, he played a lovestruck Wyatt Earp. In the 50s, he played the most levelheaded of the 12 Angry Men.
In the 60s, he played a dude who shot a little kid in the face, point-blank, then chuckled about it afterward.
Sergio Leone’s epic horse opera Once Upon a Time in the West conjures up one of the most dog-eat-dog western settings this side of Deadwood, and the baddest dog of them all is Henry Fonda’s sneering hired killer Frank – so evil, in fact, he apparently only needs a first name. What makes Frank such an icon of western villainy isn’t just his decidedly casual sadism – it’s also the fact that Fonda’s got such an fatherly, heroic-looking face, it makes the sight of him gunning down an entire family or violently having his way with co-star Claudia Cardinale that much more disturbing to witness. By the end of the nearly three-hour film, you’re clawing at the armrests waiting to see him get pumped full of hot lead.

Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, Blue Velvet

Nobody ever accused Dennis Hopper of being a particularly grounded guy, but his zoned-out characters in films like Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider at least seemed harmless enough to share a doobie with.
No so Frank Booth, the wild-eyed, sex-crazed, Roy Orbison-loving psychotic that makes Norman Bates seem positively well-adjusted. Played with a mix of soft-spoken menace and full-volume hysterical mega-insanity – sorry, but they haven’t yet invented a word that can accurately describe Frank Booth in a fit of rage – this character is terrifying even by the high standards of David Lynch’s wonderfully warped filmography, and arguably represents the finest work of Hopper’s lengthy career. Whether he’s dazedly lip-synching along to "In Dreams" with a fellow weirdo played by Dean Stockwell, beating the crap out of aw-shucks small-town protagonist Kyle MacLachlan, or horrifically redefining the “S” in S&M, this is one film character that you pray doesn’t have a real-life counterpart.
And, yes, I know that Dennis Hopper is probably the least-famous actor on this list, but I had to include him simply because Frank Booth would eat all of these other villains for breakfast – with a basketful of kittens on the side and a tall glass of anthrax to wash it all down.

Jack Nicholson as The Joker, Batman

Ledger may go down in history as the best onscreen Joker ever, but Jack Nicholson’s hedonistic perma-sneer perfectly suited the tone of Tim Burton’s original Batman film.
Nicholson demanded top billing to appear as the villain in Burton’s dark-yet-campy interpretation of pointy-eared hero’s origin story, and as good as star Michael Keaton was in the title role, ol’ Jack earned his top-dog spot in the credits with a performance that didn’t humanize the Clown Prince of Crime but rather played up his most entertainingly comic book-y qualities. Backed by Prince’s throbbing funk soundtrack and killer production design that perfectly realizes a sort of trippy cartoon version of film noir, Nicholson’s Joker is the loudest and most colorful instrument in a symphony of cinematic excess – and his work is one of the big reasons why Burton’s Batman still has plenty of admirers despite the overwhelming fan support of Nolan’s deeper, grittier caped crusader saga.

Al Pacino as John Milton, The Devil’s Advocate

Satan’s a character that tends to chew scenery in just about anything he shows up in – see, for instance, The Bible – so it’s surprising that it took until 1997 to cast Al Pacino as a thinly veiled version of Christianity’s number-one supervillain.
Trading the usual cloven hooves for a pair of thousand-dollar wingtips, Pacino plays the prince of darkness as a multi-millionaire Manhattan lawyer named John Milton, who bedevils innocent legal hotshot Keanu Reeves into joining his Satanic law firm (now that’s a redundant phrase, har har har) and does his bidding from a ridiculously luxurious office that would make Gordon Gekko green with envy.
Pacino doesn’t get to do his requisite screaming flip-out thing until pretty late in director Taylor Hackford’s overlong but trashily fun combination of legal thriller and religious horror flick, but his performance is an insidiously great one because he’s just way too damn persuasive about why being evil is so awesome – it might have been Billy Joel who said the sinners have much more fun, but nobody argues the point quite as eloquently as this sharp-dressed S.O.B. does.

The live-action/CGI Speed Racer movie is out this Friday, which I thought would make for a good occasion to check out the Japanese sci-fi flick Casshern, another anime-inspired film that features real live actors interacting with surreal, hyper-detailed computer-generated sets.

Unfortunately, technology failed me as usual when I attempted to watch the film – after about 20 minutes of eye-popping coolness, the dvd did that awful, unfixable skip-‘n-stop thing that dvds sometimes do, leaving me wondering just what the hell a “Casshern” really was and, also, what I was going to write about for this week’s Movie Match.

And then it hit me. Technology may have crapped out on me this weekend, but there’s one guy who it worked out pretty damn well for: Robert Downey, Jr.’s fictional billionaire Tony Stark, whose superpowered Iron Man suit blasted him toward a $100 million-plus box-office payday last weekend that surpassed even the most generous predictions for the film’s success. I had high hopes for Iron Man, and was impressed by just how much the movie lived up to them – and so, in order to cover my ass this week, er, share my enthusiasm for this season’s first major blockbuster, I will devote the rest of this column to a few reasons why Iron Man is well worth catching in theaters a second time.

1. The first action sequence
Most fans will walk out of the theater raving about Tony Stark’s ass-kicking exploits in his trademark fire-engine red Iron Man suit (I could watch that scene with him and the tank about a hundred times in a row), but let’s not forget the first time we get to see him wreak some havoc in a mechanical suit of armor, as comparatively low-tech as his prototype Iron Man getup is. There’s a real sense of fun that underlines the carnage in the film’s initial action setpiece, which has Stark blasting his way out of a terrorist stronghold while still awkwardly learning the finer points of mechanized combat – thankfully, his inexperience doesn’t prevent him from chucking freedom-haters around like ragdolls or unleashing a pair of arm-mounted flamethrowers that may just be the must-have movie accessory of 2008. It’s the perfect lead-in to the sparing but spectacular superhero mayhem to follow.

2. The dialogue
Robert Downey, Jr. slings one-liners like nobody else in Hollywood, and the filmmakers behind Iron Man were smart to let him go full-throttle with them throughout the film – even if his sense of humor is a bit over the heads of the action-figure buying segment of the film’s audience. Whether cracking wise about MySpace pages or delivering awkward romantic come-ons a la Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (if I mention that movie enough in this column, will somebody please see it?), Downey’s Tony Stark is outfitted with a gift of gab that far surpasses any screen superhero we’ve seen so far. I’m not sure how much of the killer dialogue to credit to the film’s writers as opposed to Downey himself, but either way this is easily the wittiest movie this genre has produced to date.

3. Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts
Female characters tend to get sidelined in even the best comics-to-screen adaptations, but despite her limited screen time, Paltrow did a fine job carving out some space for herself as Tony Stark’s devoted assistant and schoolboy crush Pepper Potts in this one. Crafting a poised, down-to-earth character who’s the perfect foil for Downey’s wisecracking, big-kid persona, Paltrow was one of the big reasons that Iron Man seemed like a much classier, more grown-up superhero movie than we might have expected. Plus, if you’ll allow me to get my chauvinist on for a second, she also looked better in this flick than in anything she’s done since the late 90s.

4. The visuals
Matthew Libatique is one of my favorite cinematographers, having been responsible for the jaw-dropping camerawork in all three of director Darren Aronofsky’s films, so I expected great things from Iron Man in the visual department. For the most part, it was hard to be disappointed – from the dimly-lit caves where Tony Stark fashions his clunky original Iron Man suit to the futuristic Malibu mansion where he tinkers with servos and beds the occasional Vanity Fair reporter, the film’s settings and characters pop off the screen as vividly and stylishly as anything you’d see on the comics page.

5. The bit after the end credits
You probably need to be a bit more of a hardcore Marvel acolyte than I am to fully appreciate it, but the two-minute scene that ran after Iron Man’s end credits was pretty cool nevertheless -- it not only featured my favorite celebrity cameo of the year so far, but also dropped some really tantalizing clues as to where the next Iron Man movie, and the onscreen Marvel universe as a whole, will be headed in the near future. Based on this little teaser, we geeks have a lot to look forward to.

Normally here in Movie Match I’m all about looking back on films you might have missed, but this week – it being the unofficial start of summer movie season and all – I thought, just this once, it might be more fun to look forward.

I’ll tell you exactly what I’m looking forward to: the awesome-looking comic book adaptation Iron Man, which finally arrives in theaters tomorrow after tantalizing fanboys like myself for the better part of a year with its Robert Downey Jr. wisecracks and cooler-than-Transformers-looking robo-slugfest action scenes. Early reviews – even some of the more negative ones -- have pegged this film as a surefire start to a lucrative new franchise, and that’s probably a good thing for comics-to-screen fans. Why? Because Hollywood lately seems to have exhausted all the superheroes your mom might be familiar with (Spider-man, Batman, Hulk, that blue tights guy, et al) and is soon going to have to rely on lesser-known comics properties like Iron Man to keep butts in the seats. That may actually end up being a positive, since it frees filmmakers up from having to pay lip service to the well-worn origin stories and character traits of the heroes everybody already knows and allows them to cut loose with unique and original visions of less-famous characters, like Guillermo Del Toro did with his Hellboy series. I’m not saying all second-tier superhero flicks are necessarily worth catching (Elektra, anyone?), but here are just a few of the ones coming out in the next year or so that should give the genre a shot in the arm.

Wanted
This eye-popping adaptation of Mark Millar and J.G Jones’s comics miniseries is sure to be one of this summer’s hot tickets – if the film can live up to one of the coolest trailers I’ve seen in a while, that is. The story of an average office drone (James McAvoy) who discovers that his murdered father belonged to a super-secret, superpowered band of assassins who now want to recruit him, Wanted promises over-the-top action by the truckload, as energetically directed by Timur Bekmambetov – the guy behind the stylish (if not entirely coherent) Night Watch trilogy. The cast is a big asset here, with Angelina Jolie stepping into familiar bad-girl territory as the veteran hit-woman who shows McAvoy the ropes; co-stars Morgan Freeman, Common, and Terence Stamp should give the flick a big boost, too. You can catch it starting June 27 – if your local multiplex is willing to pull a few screens away from The Dark Knight, that is.

Punisher: War Zone
2004’s Punisher movie, starring Thomas Jane as vengeance-driven antihero Frank Castle, was not one of the better adaptations out there, but the film’s impressive dvd business and the character’s enduring popularity still paved the way for a sequel that’s set to drop this fall. Jane’s out as Castle this time – “creative differences,” so he’s said – so Ray Stevenson of TV’s Rome will be taking his place as the new Punisher, with 300’s Dominic West joining the franchise as disfigured villain Jigsaw. The film is reportedly darker, bloodier, and more in the spirit of the “adult” Punisher comics than the somewhat sanitized (but still pretty violent) 2004 film, and director Lexi Alexander’s rough and critically acclaimed soccer flick Green Street Hooligans proved that she’s definitely got a handle on this type of testosterone-soaked material. The tentative release date is December 5.

The Spirit
The solo directorial debut of comics guru Frank Miller, The Spirit takes a character created by late comics guru Will Eisner and throws him into a very cool-looking live-action/animation hybrid a la Robert Rodriguez’s Miller adaptation Sin City. Relative newcomer Gabriel Macht plays the title role, a dedicated cop who’s resurrected as a darkness-dwelling crimefighter who has a way with the ladies and a Batman-like bond with the city where he does his bidding. Samuel L. Jackson handles villain duties as The Octopus, while a rather amazing lineup of female costars – Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Jaime King, and Paz Vega – play the many women in The Spirit’s life, both good and evil. The film releases January of next year, but to whet your appetite you can check out the short but very promising teaser trailer at the film’s official site, http://www.mycityscreams.com/.

Billy Batson and the Legend of Shazam
This one’s still in the scripting stages, but actually, that has a lot to do with why I’m so excited about it. A take on the not-exactly-well-known Captain Marvel saga, this clunkily titled adaptation (expect that to get shortened by the time it’s actually done) comes to us from super-scribe John August, best known for working with Tim Burton on films like Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and my favorite, Big Fish. Since the Cap’s story is one of the cornier ones in the comics universe – Billy Batson is a teenager who becomes the superpowered Captain Marvel when he utters the magical word “Shazam!” – you can expect August to have some tongue-in-cheek fun with the adaptation; this sure as hell ain’t gonna be Batman Begins, but I think a more lighthearted, campy, self-aware kind of superhero movie could be a blast if done right. No word yet on when we’ll get to find out, but the film does already have a director (comedy guy Peter Segal) and a lead villain: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who’s agreed to play the Cap’s nemesis, Black Adam.