Don’t pay attention to the other reviews of this “spoof” movie. Super Hero movie was badly advertised as being another bad, thrown-together parody much like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans. Filled with immense character development and a lot of heart, this is the deepest, most well-written, respectable superhero film ever made. Its only problem is its spoofy-title and its bad press.

Superhero Movie is a little bit like Spider-Man but far more original and less contrived. The villain does not wear a green power ranger mask. His name is Hourglass and is hands down the most formidable bad guy you’ll ever see. He was the CEO of a major company who tested an experimental machine which gave him super powers and turned him into an evil, costumed nemesis for Dragonfly. He needs to kill people and steal their life force in order to survive; if he gets enough, he becomes immortal. Extremely new, extremely witty stuff– I can’t believe Stan Lee never thought of it

Then we have the hero, the Drangonfly, whose powers to break dance on walls and to make every animal who comes near him sexually attracted to him surprisingly useful in his fight against evil. His inability to fly until he sprouts wings in the final scene is quite touching. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. His back story is brilliant– instead of his parents being murdered in front of him by a gunman like almost every other major superhero, his parents are accidentally murdered by him in a back alley while being held up by a gunman. His love interest, Jill, is made more human by having a family that hates her and shoots machine guns at each other in the house, which I think a lot of us can relate to.

I don’t know why superhero pictures never win Oscars. Even over his best selling books about quantum physics, this is Stephen Hawking’s crowning achievement.

I can’t say enough about the human side of this movie. It has a certain realism its predecessors lack. Where are all the gross bodily functions in Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman, where? Without them, those movies feel too glossy and perfect.

Although he is an African American and rides a bicycle as well as a toilet on wheels, Tracy Morgan manages to play a Professor Xavier that is much truer to the comics than Patrick Stewart. He helps us to really feel for the students at his School for Non-Asian Gifted. Stewart is simply too serious and too British.

Perhaps what these films needed was something less thrown-together and less gimicky. A simple title and a simple plot goes a long way to getting to the heart of what American comic books are really about. Above all, this film has a moral that is lacking in most of today’s cinema: “With great power comes b*tches.”

-Just kidding. It was actually about as lame as you’d probably expect. It’ll be worth a rent for a few amusing moments but have a remote handy to fast forward and make sure someone else is shelling out the three bucks. April Fools!

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: comic book, parody, spoof, superheroes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Capt Logan, Movies, comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.