“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.