Yeah, I think there are lots of actors like that, and while it suggests they may not be Lon Chaney, it still doesn't mean they aren't very good actors, and actors with range. Take Nicholson. If you watch Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoo's Nest, the Shining, Batman, and As Good As It Gets, you're getting similar performances in some way, but you also see the entire gamut of human emotion done very convincingly--triumph, despair, psychosis, joy, anger, frustration, boredom, confusion, understanding, etc. And it's all done in a way that makes perfect sense for the character. I think Leo Dicaprio, Tom Hanks (minus maybe the one role he had as the guy in the airport), Tom Cruise, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Toshiro Mifune, Paul Newman, hell, the vast majority of major actors fit into this category. The rare exceptions are guys like Gary Oldman, Robert Deniro (early on of course, before he became a caricature of himself) and Daniel Day-Lewis, who frequently transform themselves into completely new entities for films. I would add Christian Bale to the last list. But I don't discount a guy's abilities just because he sticks to variations on a core theme.
Honestly, that movie, in it's entirety was better, and more "Superman" than MoS.
