Superhero Movie was everything it was supposed to be. It seems a moot point to try and review a film like this. What service does it provide to anyone to tear apart a film that nobody expects to be good? I mean, there is always the chance that we get one of those bonus movies – “wow, I had no idea that it was going to be like this…that was actually really good…”. Superhero movie was not surprisingly good. Nor was it surprisingly bad. It actually had a tight story that was told in a concise fashion so that this film, with dismal comedy in it, did not even feel too long. Now, this did not provide it with any merit because it was a direct clone of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man film. You can thank him for the story. Or Stan Lee. So to be fair to the genre of over-the-top silly comedies, I’ll judge it based on those parameters.
From 2 the people who brought us Scary movie 3-5 (5 is in the works), comes Superhero Movie. Rick Rykers is your everyday high school nerd who is obsessed with the girl of his dreams – who happens to be completely out of his league. On a field trip to a research lab, he is bitten by a radioactive dragonfly and begins developing the powers of (what other than a) dragonfly. He becomes a crimefighter known as Dragonfly. He fashions his costume too quickly for any novice to realistically do so, he confronts the school bully in a ridiculous fashion yet nobody suspects him of having any extraordinary powers, and his aunt has some horrible jokes coupled with even poorer delivery – it is a direct parody of Spider-Man. As a huge fan of Spider-Man, I’m able to appreciate the jokes that poke fun at how easily things seem to come to new superheroes in the campier comic book movies. This movie has a blast doing that. It essentially points out everything your dad, or skeptical best friend didn’t like about all the superhero movies that you do like. It did that very well. What it didn’t do was provide us with good jokes about those movies.
The villain, played by Christopher McDonald, is a spoof on Dock Ock and Green Goblin. He’s a scientist-turned-bad-guy after one of his experiments goes wrong. He starts sucking the life force from other people and begins a quest for immortality…only Dragonfly can stop him. This character would have been completely unfunny had it not been for Christopher McDonald. Something about watching him be disgusted, disappointed, or appaled always makes me laugh.
The “Mary Jane” of the story is played by AquaMarine‘s Sara Paxton (-who actually once snubbed me a friendly wave on set while I was an extra, so…wait, no, that’s fine, that’s totally – yeah, I guess that makes sense). She plays the character exactly as she was supposed to – hot as hell, sweet, and oblivious. She did a fine job, but seemed to exert all the acting power that she could, as Gilmore Girls’ Alex Bledel seems to be taking all the good roles she could have (kind of like how Joseph Gordon Levitt made it so that Edward Furlong fell off the map by being a “good actor”).
Here’s what got to me: if handled differently, this movie could have been a very apt and necessary poke at the barrage of superhero movies that are coming out lately. It was not a satire, or even an intellgent parody, though. It was laden with TMZ-style jokes and sight gags that were nothing short of predictable.
The parody, to a certain extent, is always bringing the original content into the ridiculous or the absurd. The higher brow way might be to go to the absurd, but it is hard to make a parody without being over-the-top silly. Look at Weird Al. He’s been around for twenty years now and is still making up his own lyrics to songs we all know and making them about ridiculous subjects. Admittedly – I loved Weird Al in grade school and his Trapped in the Closet parody is actually really funny. So what’s stopped this movie, and all the other spoof movies coming out, from reaching a point of cleverness, intelligence, or apt humor? Maybe it’s that the same people keep making them. These people keep thinking of them, making them, then putting them out and turning quite a profit off of them despite dismal reviews. As always, I blame America. With “Disaster Movie” on the horizon, the terrorists have already won. No pun intended.
Maybe what we need is a new team of fresh minds to do these spoof movies if they need to keep coming out. People who will rely more on universal humor that is timeless, like Top Secret!, Airplane, or Naked Gun. Humor that you can watch without any prior knowledge of the films being spoofed, or the time in which they were produced, while still laughing your ass off. I can watch any of the previously mentioned films and still think they are funny – and more importantly so can someone 10 years younger than me. Nobody will look back on Epic Movie, Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, or any other spoof films by this team and laugh. Paris Hilton jokes are dated even now, imagine how irrelevant they will be in 10 years. The first two Scary Movies had it right. They just took that concept way too far and ran out of jokes. This movie is another example of that. We need some new people on these movies. They will continue to come out in all of our lifetimes in some way, shape or form. Since I have been around, they have been a fact of life, like taxes, death, or your parents calling at inconvenient times – we might as well demand better ones.
Now, when it comes to the post-Scary-Movie spoofs for this team, Superhero Movie is definitely their best. I’ve been unfortunate enough to have watched all of them. This film has a cohesive (although carbon-copied) story that maintains its focus until the end. It makes a lot of keen obsevations, but in ways that are horrible. It squeezes in character cameos (Xavier, Johnny Storm) as much as it can, with absolutely no reason or logic (or real funny moments) behind them. It has two running gags that get old, but are essentially funny at first(Stephen Hawking is one of the most recurring characters and always gets the shit end of the stick).
I wouldn’t recommend going out and actively buying this film, nor would I recommend renting it – unless you enjoy this sort of thing, of course. If it’s on TV or if someone you know is watching it, though, it could be kind of fun to sit (…or put yourself?) through. Just make sure you’re not the one staring blankly and sadly at your wallet after it’s over.