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| Director: James Gunn (2010) |
Super centres on Frank (Rainn Wilson), a
man who chooses to fight back against the criminals in the town where he lives.
After losing the love of his life Sarah (Liv Tyler) to a drug dealer who causes
her to relapse, he takes matters into his own hands to clean up the streets and
extract his revenge. Director James Gunn gives us a completely outlandish
satire on superheroes, but one that often caused me to grimace when I should
have been laughing.
It’s pretty obvious that Frank is a very
deluded individual. Even though Sarah takes her possessions with her, he’s
convinced that she’s been kidnapped. After a bizarre scene that is interpreted
as a message from God, Frank sees this as a reason to don a costume and cowl to
take vengeance on those who break the law. While his vigilante actions are presented
as good intentions, he lacks the abilities and morals to do the job with any
degree of success. Befriending the comic book store working Libby (Ellen Page)
they team up to make a team of deranged crime busting lunatics.
The message that Super portrays is bewildering.
While yes, Frank attacks criminals, and there's nothing wrong with a child
molester getting smashed in the face with a pipe wrench, things soon get taken
too far. Some people (drug dealers, muggers) also deserve such a violent
punishment, while others (people who cut lines at the cinema) shouldn’t be
beaten within an inch of their life. While no one likes line cutters, Frank
exhibits the traits of a psychopath, almost instantaneously causing a total
loss of empathy for him. He claims this is a task set to him by god, which
makes for genuinely unsettling viewing. Gunn attempts to conceal this by
sprinkling in some actually funny humour, but the laughter is drowned out by Libby,
who becomes his maniacal kid sidekick, Boltie. While Page puts in an electric
and quirky performance, though her character multiplies the films psychopathic
nature, almost bludgeoning a man to death with a statue just for maybe keying her friend’s car. The
misplaced anger and rage of the first 2 acts is finally focused through the
climax, an assault on the drug dealing, wife stealing swine Jacques (an ace
Kevin Bacon). The action is solid, making for an eventful and explosive climax
So, after 80 minutes of flitting between a
black comedy and brutal violence, Super finishes with the strangest of endings.
It’s almost as if Frank is rewarded for his crazy actions, and things are tied
up with a warm and fluffy bow. This is Gunn’s biggest failing throughout Super,
he can’t decide what kind of tone to settle on, resulting in a film that makes
us laugh one minute and hate our ‘protagonists’ the next. The film acknowledges
this and perhaps giving a nice ending to such a monster of a person was the
point. Super is consistently breaking conventions with great results, but this
justification for psychopathic, actions sours the experience somewhat.
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