Super

“Anyone Can Be A Hero”

Unfunny is not how a comedy would want to be described. A movie like “Taxi Driver” wouldn’t be considered a comedy. Yet in “Super” Rainn Wilson plays a Travis Bickle-type psycho in a movie that comes dressed up like a comedy yet has more violence than a Martin Scorsese picture.

Wilson loses his wife (Liv Tyler) to Kevin Bacon, so he decides to become a home-made crime-fighter. He’s as human as you and I, with no special powers, but he creates the masked and costumed character Crimson Bolt and runs through the streets yelling “Shut Up Crime!” That’s funny, until it becomes evident that he might be very psychologically disturbed.

Eventually he meets up with Ellen Page in a comic book shop and she recruits herself to become his sidekick Boltie. There’s real chemistry between them and some of their scenes together are genuinely touching. Their journey leads to a startlingly bizarre conclusion which, again, is not funny.

“Super” is too straightforward to be a parody of superhero movies. A few years back we had the comedy “Superhero Movie” which did that much better. When “Super” is being funny, and it does have moments, the comedy is intelligent and not just random slapstick. But then it gets all dark again. It’s a movie in search of a genre.

The weird tonal shifts in “Super” will catch most people off guard. Maybe director James Gunn means for his film’s violent moments to get laughs. I have a very liberal sense of humor, and I usually laugh a lot at black comedy. The trouble here is that the bloody moments just aren’t funny. They’re often painful to watch. It’s like they belong in another movie.

DVD Double Feature:

In 1994 Damon Wayans played a self-made superhero in a more obvious comedy called “Blankman”. It co-stars David Alan Grier, Robin Givens and Jason Alexander.