Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion
Runtime: 96 mins.
2010
Super was dead in the water.
The action-drama-comedy was released concurrently with the Mark Millar adaptation Kick-Ass, a movie with a suspiciously similar premise. Super's critical reception was decidedly mixed, with many critics dismantling its erratic tone, meandering plot, and a whopper of a weird performance by Ellen Page. The film only made a few hundred thousand, trailing in the wake of the $48 million gross of Kick-Ass. Many viewers expressed confusion, discomfort, or dismissal towards the film. Scratch that--only a few viewers expressed those things. This film didn't have many viewers in the first place.
Yet here we are four years later, and director James Gunn is about to release Guardians of the Galaxy, sure to be one of the biggest films of the year. How does a director transition from directing a flop of a superhero film that couldn't crack half a million to directing a Marvel movie that is sure to make hundreds of millions of dollars to widespread critical acclaim?
Maybe the secret is in Super. Let's find it.
I want to make one thing clear first, though. I mentioned that Super and Kick-Ass have suspiciously similar premises, but in this case the suspicion is unfounded. Gunn and Millar were working on their own projects at the same time; neither of them would have had the opportunity to steal from the other. Gunn's film also feels undeniably personal, the result of buried trauma from a Roman Catholic upbringing and fresh trauma from a recent divorce. At any rate, the two films are sufficiently different that the idea of one being derivative of the other is ridiculous. Kick-Ass is a fun and occasionally troublesome romp through the id of superheroism. It's very much a surface-level film that tries to deconstruct comic book culture, but often gets caught up in its own fanfare. Gunn's Super is by all accounts a darker, more disturbing, more daring and complex film about the dangers of psychological displacement, and the difficulties of a bad break-up.
Super begins with our hero Frank Darbo (Rainn Wilson) narrating for us the only two truly happy moments of his life. The first moment is his marriage to Sarah (Liv Tyler), a recovering drug addict who is way out of his league and becomes more bored with Frank's dull normalcy as time goes on. The second moment is when he helped a policeman stop a criminal by pointing him in the right direction. Frank monumentalizes these moments by drawing the scenes in crayon and mounting them on his wall so that he can look at them when he wakes up every morning. Frank is a good guy with a mediocre life. That is, until Sarah falls in with a bad crowd, and eventually leaves him for a local drug dealer named Jacques (played with gusto by Kevin Bacon). Frank's confusion and frustration in the wake of his wife's abscondence leads him down a path of aimlessness, revenge, religious visions, and eventually cathartic superheroism. He comes to believe that he is chosen by God to rid the world of evil, which conveniently includes those men who are keeping his wife from him.
Then Frank proceeds to brutalize "evildoers" with a wrench under his new alias, the Crimson Bolt.
Super is a movie that is not for everyone. It's a black comedy, and it is indeed very funny. The humor is crude, gross, restless, and the dialogue crackles with energy. Gunn displays the kind of slick, cutting comedy you might expect to find in a Shane Black flick--say, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, another excellent send-up of genre films. Wilson crafts Frank Darbo as a man-child, the most popular of tropes for Hollywood comedies. But Wilson's man-child doesn't share the over-the-top theatricality of Carrey, Carell, or Ferrell (wow, such similar names). Wilson brings a straight-edged gravitas to the character that helps us navigate his psychology. "Haha, I do weird stuff when I'm alone too," we think. "This guy's just a lonely person like the rest of us," we think. Which makes it all the more disturbing when the film ditches the comedy to focus on drama. We see the ripped seams of Frank's worldview as he prays to God searching for answers, scathingly critiques himself in casual conversation, and shouts at his victims: "YOU DON'T SELL DRUGS. YOU DON'T MOLEST LITTLE CHILDREN. YOU DON'T PROFIT ON THE MISERY OF OTHERS." This is a man who desperately needs to feel that he is Right and Good, to the point that he covers his walls with his own iconography.
To be clear, the people who Frank assaults are victims. Sometimes they are clearly criminals, sometimes not. Thus we get into the moral grey area of the film and approach what I consider the most interesting aspect. Super builds an incredibly rich thematic territory for itself by weaving together three disparate thematic threads:
1) A critique of the fascistic psychosexual sociopathy of superhero culture.
2) An analysis of the dangers of absolutism, moral or otherwise, specifically couched in Christian religious discourse.
3) An allegory for the psychological displacement involved in break-ups that so often boils down to the dangerous proclamation: "I am good. The man who stole her from me is bad."
It's really sophisticated stuff. In fact, it harpoons its targets so accurately that it may have alienated much of the potential audience it could have gained. Showing people their demons tends to make them uncomfortable.
Speaking of which, James Gunn plays a demon named Demonswill in this movie. It's pretty great.
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| Yes, there is also Nathan Fillion, playing the role of the Holy Avenger. |
Allow me to take a step back to conclude. I want to talk about DC and Marvel's respective approaches to comic book films.
There's a popular conception that the best superhero films are gritty and realistic. This viewpoint came into being as a result of the whirlwind success of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. In an effort to recapture that lightning in a bottle, DC has made the dark, gritty ethos its modus operandi. In other words, they're clinging to the belief that as long as their films are serious-minded and colorless, they will succeed. We see this trend manifest in DC's Man of Steel (which ended up pretty flacid), as well as their upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (I feel embarrassed just typing that title). Have you seen that movie's promotional photos? Batman is dark, veiny, brooding to the extreme. Even Wonder Woman is washed-out and grim. Basically, it looks like it'll be a Frank Millergasm all over the screen.
For those who don't know, Frank Miller wrote a few incredibly influential Batman comics called The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. These were the first of the new wave of gritty superhero reimaginings. They're amazing stories, but perhaps their central tenet is that they subvert the idea of superheroism rather than glorify it. Somehow, probably thanks to a misunderstanding of Nolan's Batman, contemporary nerd culture has decided that gritty superheroes are less about subversion, and more about justification. They want to feel like their fixation on childhood heroes is properly mature and adult, so superhero movies must be gritty and sophisticated. Really, they are masking several truths, one of which is that it's okay to still be enamored with childhood heroes, and the another of which is that it's not okay to ignore the implications of that.
I'm getting carried away, so let's try to focus in: My point is that Super is an invective against the irresponsible use of superhero culture. It's no accident that the movie references Batman several times specifically, and it's no accident that Warner Bros. is trying to re-establish that particular hero as the cornerstone of its superhero franchise. Super calls Batman out. If we're going to take the man seriously, let's take him seriously: Batman is a sociopath, fueled by anger, who has displaced the anger from the death of his parents into a passion for his own brand of justice. I feel as if Super is a better commentary on Batman than Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice has a chance to be.
Thank goodness for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Rather than opting for the dark, gritty path of superheroism, Marvel recognizes perhaps the single most important aspect of these colorful mythological figures: superheroes are fun. Marvel manages to work complex themes into its movies (Tony Stark's PTSD in Iron Man 3, the political subterfuge and confusion of The Winter Soldier) without condescending to its audience. They don't pretend superheroes have to be serious to be legitimate. They just want you to have a good time.
This is why Marvel's choice of James Gunn for Guardians of the Galaxy makes so much sense. He's an intelligent writer/director who understands the dangers of his source material completely--but also understands how to have fun with it. Both Super and Gunn's first film as director, Slither, fall into this category. Now he finally gets a chance to display his talent to the world with Guardians.
Super may at first seem like it fits in with the gritty DC crowd of superhero deconstruction. Upon further examination, though, Gunn is too savvy to fall into that easy aesthetic answer. Instead, Super challenges superhero archetypes, and moral/religious absolutism, and unhealthy break-up attitudes. Most of all, it challenges us. For that, and for its bold, personal approach to the genre, it should be lauded. Check it out if you have the stomach.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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