Superhero Movie (2008)
Superhero Movie
Directed By: Craig Mazin
Cast: Drake Bell, Sara Paxton, Christopher McDonald, Leslie Nielsen
Reviewed by: Ken Mooney
Rating: One-Out-Of-Five Bananas
Occasionally a film can be forgiven for being incredibly bad if it’s the least bit entertaining. Unfortunately, Superhero Movie is no such film, falling into the absolutely terrible category of film-making.
The plot is lifted straight out of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman: teenage outcast Rick Riker (Drake Bell) gets bitten by a mutated dragonfly on a school trip, an accident that gives him superpowers. While he struggles to let the girl of his dreams/neighbour Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton) know how he feels about her, he enters the superhero world only to come face to face with the villainous Lou Landers and his alter-ego, The Hourglass, played by Christopher McDonald.
If you’ve seen Spiderman, you’ll know exactly how it goes: despite a few detours through Batman Begins, and the Fantastic Four and X-Men films, Superhero Movie treads the same old ground, with whole scenes and pieces of dialogue lifted (and occasionally warped) to fit in. Add in a few of the spoof gags that we’re all familiar with from back in the days of Airplane, The Naked Gun and everything Mel Brooks has ever touched, and you’ll arrive at the realisation that Superhero Movie just doesn’t work. At all.
Perhaps it’s just that Superhero Movie is attempting to spoof the entirely wrong genre. Superheroes always have, and had, a sense of humour when appearing on screen, whether big or small, whether the throwaway lines of Iron Man or Batman Begins or the glaring camp of most other Batman interpretations. It’s a genre that just doesn’t lend itself to being parodied particularly well, because it already is a parody of the real world. And if none of the serious movies tickle your funnybone, just look back to a time when Adam West and his moobs played Batman, or even 1999’s Mystery Men.
Even as a comedy in its own right, Superhero Movie commits a cardinal sin by just not being funny: Leslie Nielsen steals the show as Rick’s Uncle Albert, but as we’ve known since the eighties, he really needs a straight man to play against (yes, we’re discussing OJ here...) Drake Bell just can’t cut it and Marion Ross’s Aunt Lucille, capable of being that straight character, spends too little screen time with Nielsen in the final scheme of things. The requisite drug and sex jokes needed in a modern spoof movie never quite hit the spot, and some scenes are just downright offensive (making fun of Stephen Hawking is never funny, least of all the third time around!)
When the funniest moments in a film are included in a trailer you don’t really laugh at, you know you’re in trouble: more to the point, when you see a Pamela Anderson cameo and you think she could do better, you know you must be watching something really bad.
Verdict:
If a supervillain is holding your family and friends hostage, and the only way of saving them is by watching this film and there’s no other way out…try to close your eyes and shut it out. It’s not even an hour and a half. Otherwise, run away. At super-speed.
Originally published on FrankTheMonkey.com