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.
