Movie Review: Super

LITTLE ROCK — Super really isn’t, although it makes a reasonable attempt, and it will probably satisfy the same hip, indie cohort that “mehed” Kick-Ass and embraced Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. In other words, it’s an inside joke that’s not really supposed to be taken any way but ironically, or laughed at too hard.

There are parts that are really good, and most of them involve Ellen Page as a creepy cute comic-book store clerk. And the animated opening title sequence is kind of cool. But while I’ve no doubt director James Gunn knows exactly what he’s doing and that the movie’s violent and sudden dissonant shifts in tone are intentional and designed to discomfit and unbalance the audience, that doesn’t make them enjoyable. (There’re sort of like the artificial means Gaspar Noe sometimes employs in his movies - like the 27-hertz tone that allegedly produces nausea thathe employed in Irreversible.)

I’m all for an artist using any tools he chooses to produce whatever effects he can, but that doesn’t absolve him from a responsibility of saying something interesting. And while there’s a promising idea in the premise (what if an ordinary guy started acting like a real-life superhero?) it’s hardly a novel or unexplored idea. And Gunn’s take on it isn’t that different from what we’ve seen and contemplated before, and his admittedly interesting scruffy aesthetic isn’t enough to elevate the film much above the sorta interesting level.

Anyway, the movie stars Rainn Wilson as Frank, a cuckolded short-order cook who - after experiencing a vision in which he’s touched by the finger of God - sews himself a superhero costume, calls himself the Crimson Bolt and goes around conking alleged evildoers on the head with a wrench.

The movie also stars Liv Tyler as Frank’s wife, an enjoyable Kevin Bacon as Jacques, the sleazy drug dealer who steals her away. As an added bonus, it looks like it was filmed in Shreveport (which it was).

Frank is, of course, exactly the sort of sincere dim-bulb who makes no real distinction between child molesting and being a jerk - precisely the sort of person you wouldn’t want dispensing justice. He embarks on a campaign so violently repellent that noteven the cartoonish nature of the film cushions the blow. We quickly learn not to like Frank, and we’re weirded out that Page’s character wants to be his sidekick and girlfriend.

Now, I suppose there’s a serious film to be made about vigilantism, and the way power corrupts the individual conscience, and that there may even be a funny film to be made about these things. But Gunn’s film is too self-referential and smug, too convinced of its own hipness to try very hard to either make a point or make us laugh. It is a little too easy on itself and its putative audience, a little too hard on the corny suckers who actually believe in right and wrong and good and evil. It’s not an unintelligent movie so much as it is a cruel and slight one, one that seems to exist only to affirm a certain kind of moviegoer’s self-regard.

Gunn is a talent, a decent writer and a better director. But he should try harder and do better.

Super 82

Cast:

Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker

Director:

James Gunn

Rating:

Unrated

Running time:

96 minutes