By Samir Mathur
Contributing writer
Staff page | Twitter | Tumblr
(I actually saw Super a few weeks ago, at a Florida Film Festival press screening. I didn’t have the time, sadly, during the festival, to put down all of my thoughts about it. So here’s my excuse to do so.)
You’ve gotta feel for Super’s writer/director James Gunn. He wrote this story years and years ago, but due to casting/funding complications, it kept getting delayed. Now it’s finally here, and its thunder has sort of been stolen by last year’s Kick-Ass, a movie that did pretty well commercially, and featured a very similar premise – regular guy decides to become a superhero to fight wrongdoers. Even though the two are very different films, that main concept is the same, so it’s hard to talk about Super without comparing it with Kick-Ass. And it doesn’t help that Kick-Ass was rather good.
In Super, Rainn Wilson plays Frank, a schlubby (what else?) short-order cook whose wife has left him for another man. The other man, incidentally, is a strip-club owner and big time drug dealer, played with gleeful abandon by Kevin Bacon. When the cops can’t do anything to help, since it’s not illegal to hook up with another man’s wife, Frank decides to take matters into his own hands. A truly terrifying dream sequence – which features Frank’s skull getting opened up, and Nathan Fillion as Jesus – gives Frank some direction and heavenly guidance, and we see the obligatory “choosing a name, sewing a costume, picking a weapon” montage. Soon, The Crimson Bolt is out on the town, thwarting robbers, sexual predators and worst of all, people who cut in line at a cinema. Along the way, he meets a comic book store gal (played by Ellen Page with, and I know I’m using this phrase a second time, gleeful abandon) who becomes his partner-in-the-opposite-of-crime. Frank never forgets his true mission, though, and so of course there is a climactic showdown with Bacon’s character.
The film has a couple of very big problems. Firstly, it lurches around wildly in tone. Just in the first few minutes it shifts from a fun, giddy, animated opening sequence with a cool anthemic theme song, to scenes of Frank, at home and in his underwear, sobbing uncontrollably. There are lots of this kind of abrupt jump, from scenes that are pretty funny (as I’ve said, Bacon and Page are both very fun in this) to really bleak and harrowing. After all, this is the story of a sad-sack for whom everything already has gone wrong. And the film doesn’t underplay his misery.
It also doesn’t underplay the violence of being a superhero. I’ve heard Gunn in interviews where he laments that most movies don’t show the effects of getting punched or shot or whatever. Usually in films, someone is shot and they fall down and that’s it. Gunn realizes that the truth is a lot more bloody and messy, and he doesn’t shy away from that – he holds some shots for a few more seconds than most would, so you really feel the impact of a guy getting hit in the face with a wrench, or another guy getting his head repeatedly slammed into a concrete floor or someone getting shot with a machine gun. It is not pretty at all. There’s a very good reason that this thing is unrated – do not see this movie on a first date.
Worse, despite all his misfortune, Frank is kind of a dick, so you have a hard time rooting for him. When he smashed the two people in the face for cutting in line, it was the tipping point for me. You can get behind an average Joe who wants to make the world a better place, but not a guy who lashes out – violently – at every perceived injustice. There’s a thin line between noble do-gooder and sociopathic maniac (actually, it’s a very thick line) and Frank is on the wrong side of it.
It’s clear that Gunn was allowed to make the film entirely keeping with his own vision for it. It’s weird, profane and violent enough to show that no edges were straightened out and nothing was toned down. It’s rare, and pretty cool, that the studio allowed the director to make exactly the film he wanted to make. Problem is, I'm not sure it's the film that (big) audiences will want to see.
Contributing writer
Staff page | Twitter | Tumblr
(I actually saw Super a few weeks ago, at a Florida Film Festival press screening. I didn’t have the time, sadly, during the festival, to put down all of my thoughts about it. So here’s my excuse to do so.)
You’ve gotta feel for Super’s writer/director James Gunn. He wrote this story years and years ago, but due to casting/funding complications, it kept getting delayed. Now it’s finally here, and its thunder has sort of been stolen by last year’s Kick-Ass, a movie that did pretty well commercially, and featured a very similar premise – regular guy decides to become a superhero to fight wrongdoers. Even though the two are very different films, that main concept is the same, so it’s hard to talk about Super without comparing it with Kick-Ass. And it doesn’t help that Kick-Ass was rather good.
In Super, Rainn Wilson plays Frank, a schlubby (what else?) short-order cook whose wife has left him for another man. The other man, incidentally, is a strip-club owner and big time drug dealer, played with gleeful abandon by Kevin Bacon. When the cops can’t do anything to help, since it’s not illegal to hook up with another man’s wife, Frank decides to take matters into his own hands. A truly terrifying dream sequence – which features Frank’s skull getting opened up, and Nathan Fillion as Jesus – gives Frank some direction and heavenly guidance, and we see the obligatory “choosing a name, sewing a costume, picking a weapon” montage. Soon, The Crimson Bolt is out on the town, thwarting robbers, sexual predators and worst of all, people who cut in line at a cinema. Along the way, he meets a comic book store gal (played by Ellen Page with, and I know I’m using this phrase a second time, gleeful abandon) who becomes his partner-in-the-opposite-of-crime. Frank never forgets his true mission, though, and so of course there is a climactic showdown with Bacon’s character.
The film has a couple of very big problems. Firstly, it lurches around wildly in tone. Just in the first few minutes it shifts from a fun, giddy, animated opening sequence with a cool anthemic theme song, to scenes of Frank, at home and in his underwear, sobbing uncontrollably. There are lots of this kind of abrupt jump, from scenes that are pretty funny (as I’ve said, Bacon and Page are both very fun in this) to really bleak and harrowing. After all, this is the story of a sad-sack for whom everything already has gone wrong. And the film doesn’t underplay his misery.
It also doesn’t underplay the violence of being a superhero. I’ve heard Gunn in interviews where he laments that most movies don’t show the effects of getting punched or shot or whatever. Usually in films, someone is shot and they fall down and that’s it. Gunn realizes that the truth is a lot more bloody and messy, and he doesn’t shy away from that – he holds some shots for a few more seconds than most would, so you really feel the impact of a guy getting hit in the face with a wrench, or another guy getting his head repeatedly slammed into a concrete floor or someone getting shot with a machine gun. It is not pretty at all. There’s a very good reason that this thing is unrated – do not see this movie on a first date.
Worse, despite all his misfortune, Frank is kind of a dick, so you have a hard time rooting for him. When he smashed the two people in the face for cutting in line, it was the tipping point for me. You can get behind an average Joe who wants to make the world a better place, but not a guy who lashes out – violently – at every perceived injustice. There’s a thin line between noble do-gooder and sociopathic maniac (actually, it’s a very thick line) and Frank is on the wrong side of it.
It’s clear that Gunn was allowed to make the film entirely keeping with his own vision for it. It’s weird, profane and violent enough to show that no edges were straightened out and nothing was toned down. It’s rare, and pretty cool, that the studio allowed the director to make exactly the film he wanted to make. Problem is, I'm not sure it's the film that (big) audiences will want to see.