by Matthew Amuso. This is RETROGRADING, where we’re in between the panels.
THE FILM: Super
THE YEAR: 2010. Three years after Iron Man and a year before The Avengers, the superhero movie craze was shifting into second gear. Beore he became DCU co-head, James Gunn, director of next year’s Superman, was a minor Hollywood player. General audiences had yet to hear of Thanos or Harley Quinn and were possibly happier for it.
THE SPECS: Written and directed by James Gunn; produced by Ted Hope and Miranda Bailey; starring Rainn Wilson, Elliot Page, Liv Tyler, and Kevin Bacon; distributed by IFC Films. Rated R.
THE MAKE: James Gunn loves two things: superheroes and weirdoes. The seeds that eventually sprouted into Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad were planted early in his career. After putting in his time with B-movie powerhouse Troma Entertainment, his first Hollywood screenplay was for The Specials, a low-budget satire about a bickering superhero team that spends the entire movie sleeping around and trying to make money from a toy deal.
Unfortunately, despite some fun ideas and an interesting cast, Craig Mazin’s direction was lifeless, and The Specials didn’t bomb so much as dissipate without leaving a trace. But the script was Gunn’s first big break and helped him land jobs writing two very different 2004 hits: Scooby-Doo and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. (Is it chance or fate that Snyder’s best film was written by the guy who eventually replaced him as DC’s guiding force?)
Despite The Specials‘ critical and commercial failure, Gunn still had neurotics in masks flying around in his head. In 2002, he wrote Super, a dark comedy about a sadsack vigilante, hoping to make it his directorial debut, but producers found his script too violent and odd. While Gunn was still shopping the project around, he landed his first directing gig with Slither, a screwball throwback to ’50s sci-fi monster flicks. He intended it for someone else to direct, but instead, found himself helming a feature film for the first time. Gunn proved his skill; Slither is a blast and the first demonstration of his ability to turn a standard genre flick into something funny, heartfelt, and deeply screwed-up.
Gunn was ready to give up on making Super when Jenna Fischer (then his wife) passed the script along to her Office co-star Rainn Wilson, who immediately wanted to star. With Wilson enthusiastically attached, Gunn secured funding (2.5 million dollars), and Wilson managed to pull in Elliot Page. Bigger names followed, with Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon coming on board (the latter replacing an unreliable Jean-Claude Van Damme). It was time to roll film.
By the time Super premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010 (after a whirlwind 22-day shoot), Hollywood had become a different place than when it was written; Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class (also with Kevin Bacon!), and Green Lantern all hit theaters the following year. And just as Super was wrapping postproduction, Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (also released in 2010) provided audiences with a big-budget take on the “real world” superhero story, albeit one with much lower thematic ambitions. Super had bigger, stranger, and bloodier things on its mind.
THE REVIEW: Super tells the tale of Frank (Wilson), a quintessential loser who, in spite of his schlubiness, had the fluke luck of marrying Sarah (Tyler), a beautiful woman struggling with drug recovery. When their marriage inevitably disintegrates, Sarah hooks up with her strip club boss, smarmy drug dealer Jacques (Bacon). This development causes Frank, who had previously shown mental instability (he perceives and engages with hallucinations), to finally crack; after a hallucinatory vision fueled by his diet of crap TV, he comes to believe he’s been chosen by God to fight crime. He reinvents himself as the Crimson Bolt and hits the streets in a homemade costume, armed with a wrench and determined to win Sarah back.
There are no spectacular, CGI-fueled action sequences in Super. Frank’s attacks on local lowlifes are clumsy and brutal, and the combination is both hilarious and uncomfortable, more so as Frank moves from attacking drug dealers and child molesters to bludgeoning some guy butting in line at the movies. Super revels in details that traditional superhero comics avoid, like the boredom of sitting behind a dumpster waiting for crime to happen, the bloody horror of gun violence, and how easy it is to recognize someone you’ve met wearing a mask.
The film’s tone often swings from goofy to disturbing to surreal, which makes it difficult to grasp what it wants you to feel, but its moods ensure that you always feel something. Super continually goes to unexpected places, and no matter how different one scene might be from those that preceded it, Gunn commits to each one. Super is a quilt of various genres and emotions — a filthy quilt, but comfy nonetheless.
The film’s restless energy finds its purest expression in Frank’s sidekick, comic shop clerk Libby (Page), who operates as the aspiring hero, Boltie. At first, Libby seems genial enough (if a bit immature), like a person it’d be fun to talk comics with; later, she becomes someone you want to slowly back away from. It’s a layered performance, and as the story plunges into ever-more unsettling depths, Libby’s mania grows more violently and sexually intense. And speaking of sex, there’s no question that whatever’s driving Frank stems from repression; we see a few snippets of his traumatic Christian upbringing, and each formative moment is depicted as at least tangentially sexual.
Super works so well because Gunn understands the hilarity of despair. Shock and offense may be key elements of his strategy, but his underlying purpose is an investigation of morality — specifically, how clinging to it can give us purpose and lead us to destruction. Super‘s opening credits are animated in the childish style of Frank’s crayon drawings, and like the rest of the film, they’re violent and crudely rendered but also hopeful. Frank’s misadventures show what happens when childhood ideals come up against hard realities and how attempting to set the world right can knock it even further askew.
At points, Frank and Libby’s final assault on the bad guys feels too much like a standard action movie, albeit one with consequences, but the ultimate confrontation between Frank and Jacques reaches for operatic heights, and both actors, especially Bacon, deliver. Like every manipulative douchebag to ever walk the earth, Jacques is certain that he’s someone interesting. He’s not. Sociopaths like him are just boring, and they hurt other people to cover it up. But people who care about others enough to do something about it? They’re fascinating. So is Super.
NOSTALGIA-FEST OR REPRESSED NIGHTMARE? If two wrongs don’t make a right, then I’d rather be wrong. Super is so deranged in its warped depiction of heroism that it might inadvertently make you a better person.
RETROGRADE: B+
More RETROGRADING:
Matt Wagner brought the crossover to stylish new heights with Batman/Grendel
1998’s Blade called open season on sucky superhero movies
The scope of Zack Snyder’s frustrating Man of Steel shames modern superhero movies
