Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/3/08
While it has plenty of antecedents,
from the Hope/Crosby Road pictures to early Mel Brooks, the 'Spoof'
genre began in earnest with the 1980 classic Airplane! directed
by Jim Abrahms and brothers Jerry and David Zucker. It inspired dozens
and dozens of movies filled with non-sequitur humor and references to hit
movies, but truth be told there's almost never been a good one that wasn't
directed by either a member of the ZAZ crew or one of their protégées,
a list that includes people like Pat Proft and now Craig Mazin, who co-wrote
Scary Movies 3 & 4 for director David Zucker.
Mazin's take on the genre is more similar to the original Airplane!
or The Naked Gun than the “20 movies in a blender” approach that's
grown popular in recent years (the films of Meet the Spartans/Epic
Movie directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer consist of virtually
nothing but mentioning the names of other characters and movies).
Superhero Movie doesn't just use the plot of Spider-Man as
a clothesline to hang gags on: it's a straight-up feature-length
Mad Magazine satire of Sam Raimi's blockbuster hit. Oh, there's a
scene thrown in from Batman Begins and a side-trip to Professor
X's School for Non-Asian Gifted Children to name-drop a few of the X-Men,
but Superhero Movie ultimately plays like a direct-to-video knockoff
of Spider-Man that's completely lost its' mind. To its' credit,
it's actually not a bad low-budget crimefighter flick (Christopher McDonald's
Hourglass is a really impressive bad guy), and the jokes hit more often
than they miss. If you're hoping for more from a spoof, you're living
in the wrong decade.
High school student Rick
Ryder is a loser's loser, unnoticed by everyone but his best friend Trey
(Kevin Hart) as he pines away for the girl next door, Jill (Sara Paxton).
A class trip to Amalgamated Laboratories ends in him being bitten by a
genetically engineered dragonfly, resulting in amazing new powers, like
wallcrawling and super-strength. But there's more evil science going
on back at Amalgamated: company President Lou Landers (Christopher
McDonald) has only an hour to live, forcing him to try out a new machine
invented by Dr. Strom (Brent Spiner) which is supposed to restore him to
perfect health. The machine fails, but it gives him an amazing new
talent: he can suck the life force out of anyone, allowing him to
live for a single additional day. After learning first-hand from
his Uncle Albert (Leslie Nielsen) that with great power comes great responsibility,
Rick adopts the alias Dragonfly and begins to fight crime. Meanwhile,
Landers hungers for more than just day-to-day life, and as the costumed
Hourglass, he finds a way he could gain immortality: at the cost
of thousands of innocent lives. Can Dragonfly find a way to unlock
his full powers, stop the villain and win the girl of his dreams?
Well, this IS a superhero movie.
Obviously the humor in Superhero
Movie isn't particularly sophisticated, but anybody who's seen one
of those Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs knows that even a fart joke needs to
be skillfully delivered to work. Mazin shows a lot of skill at pulling
off both lengthy setups and surprise payoffs. He also knows how what's
merely disgusting when it happens once can be downright hilarious when
it just refuses to stop, as when playing one of Spider-Man's more
unfortunate scenes (the wince-inducingly awkward “Does Spider-Man ever
ask about me?” conversation between Peter and Mary Jane) against a relentless
background of flatulence. While not all the jokes hit, there aren't
many so bad they grind things to a halt (most of them delivered by Robert
Joy in a spot-on impression of Dr. Stephen Hawking that's a delivery system
for one groaner after another).
I wasn't happy with a few
concessions to the Friedberg/Seltzer model. Superhero characters
from other movies like X-Men's Professor X (Tracy Morgan), Storm
(Marisa Lauren), and Wolverine (Craig Bierko, who doesn't even speak until
the end credits) and Fantastic Four's Human Torch (Simon Rex) and
Invisible Woman (Pamela Anderson) turn up under their original names with
little or no comic spin and key setups, payoffs and assorted good jokes
are lifted out of the film seemingly at random to be saved for use during
the lengthy end credits as bonus gags. That in particular is a weird
experience: most of what we see in those montages of “deleted scenes”
isn't just throwaway stuff, and the movie proper would be better for its'
inclusion. The combination of the realization that the movie's been
edited down far below its' ideal length and having to sit through almost
fifteen minutes of credits leaves one feeling like they just saw a worse
movie than they actually have.
What a lot of people forget
while aping the ZAZ spoof structure is that their films always started
with a good plot. Maybe not one good enough to support a movie on
its' own, but one that would leave you rooting for Ted Striker to bring
that plane down (and down safe) at the same time you were laughing at him.
Superhero Movie has a leg up because Spider-Man was a obviously
a fine movie to start with (and a perfect target for spoofing because it's
so achingly sincere), but it's also got a great bit of inspiration in the
villainous Hourglass, played to the hilt by McDonald. This is a character
who, with a little dramatic tweaking and a better costume, could have made
a real impression in a straight comic book flick. McDonald is certainly
funny (mostly in his weary realization that he's surrounded by idiots),
but he's also got a lot of oomph in the role and delivers booming villainous
pronouncements (“I... AM... THE HOURGLASS!”) with the best of them.
The cast is good across the
board. Bell has that Robert Hayes vibe going, seeming to get the
fact that he lives in a crazy world and to live in fear of the next random
calamity that will befall him. His raised eyebrows are a great comic
tic. Paxton provides the right oblivious urgency as the love interest,
while Hart alternates gung ho energy and horror as the really old kid (he
looks every one of his 28 years) who's always standing next to Rick when
something weird happens. You shouldn't do one of these movies without
Nielsen, and he's in fine form: utterly shameless and even making
the most of a few moments of genuine sentiment. The parade of heroic
namedropping that goes on is lightened a bit by the fact that most of those
roles are played by people we remember fondly from past ZAZ spoofs, best
of all the long-absent Hayes, who has a funny flashback scene as Bell's
billionaire father with really bad investment instincts. Brent Spiner
is a hoot as the scientist whose job responsibilities include helping his
boss become a supervillain: he gets the movie's best visual joke
the first time the Hourglass motif is trotted out.
I'll go farther than what
I said in the first paragraph and say there isn't a single truly exceptional
spoof that didn't have a Zucker in the director's chair. Of that
second, Zucker-free tier, Superhero Movie is about as good as you
can expect. It's laugh-out-loud funny, I enjoyed the recycled plot,
and the cast is game and likable. Plus, it's a whole lot better than
Spider-Man 3. |
