Kevin Spacey is a scum bag, a sleaze ball, a maniacal mad man bent on world domination, a psychotic serial killer, a womanizing bastard, a criminal mastermind wrapped up in a soft, friendly looking, best friend package. It’s only recently that Spacey himself has started to figure that out.
Kevin Spacey is one of the greatest actors working in Hollywood… but only when he’s playing a villain, a bad guy, a real rotten egg. In The Usual Suspects he duped us all and did his dastardly deeds behind a mask of complacent cooperation. In Se7en he embodied the epitome of evil, the ultimate serial killer who uses even his own death to make victims dance to his tune. And then in recent years he tried to behave. He gave us lukewarm performances in awful movies like The Shipping News and Beyond the Sea where he asked us to sympathize with him, even like him. Sorry Spacey, nobody’s buying it. We know you for what you are.
The year 2000 seemed to scramble Spacey’s brain, and he got it into his head that we liked him, we really liked him. But we don’t Spacey. We just don’t. And that’s why movies like K-Pax never worked. Kevin Spacey isn’t the guy in the movie you root for, he’s the guy you love to hate. His evil is insidious, and all the moreso for his affable exterior, an affable exterior which when applied to someone who’s actually affable, somehow comes off as utterly false. It’s because we know. We know about the villain lurking inside.
Luckily, after slathering us in nice guy vomit with movies like Pay it Forward, Spacey seems to have finally figured out he’s a bastard. He’s back to beating up on the good guys, and in 2006 he served up a healthy dose of half-crazed nasty as the best Lex Luthor ever seen on screen in Superman Returns. Brandon who? Kevin Spacey, in another brilliant bad guy performance, ran away with the movie.
This weekend he’s back playing another closeted asshole in 21, and it’s good to have the real Spacey, the only Spacey we need, back on screens being himself. In light of that, it seems like the perfect time to look back at how Spacey’s reign of terror first got started. Where did this guy learn to be such a slime? The answer folks, is simple. In 1988 Spacey had a brief appearance in the movie Working Girl as a character who has since become known as “Party Bob”, and it was there that he first started abusing women, boozing it up, and snorting illegal substances. That role soon led to a life dedicated to death, destruction, and world domination. If Kevin Spacey hadn’t shoved his face in Melanie Griffith’s bra and forced her to watch porn, the world would be a much safer, villainy free place.
Don’t believe me? Hop in my time machine then, and go back to 1988. Watch dastardly Kevin Spacey discover life as an on screen piece of crap. Party on Party Bob. Party on. Take a look (and beware, this clip is NSFW):
