10 Most Overlooked Films Of This Decade
7. Super (2010)
Several years before James Gunn took the Marvel Cinematic Universe beyond the stratosphere with Guardians of the Galaxy, he directed a radically different superhero movie which turned out to be a massive box office bomb.
That film was Super, and it's a shame it was so underappreciated because this gritty take on the subject matter did a better job of whole real-life crimefighter thing than the higher-profile, and far more successful, Kick-Ass.
Super is subversively funny and cuttingly bleak in equal measure, casting Rainn Wilson as a geek with a screw loose who dons the mantel of the Crimson Bolt when his wife leaves him for a strip joint-owning criminal who gets her hooked on drugs.
Wilson's character (who has one of the greatest catch phrases ever with 'shut up, crime') is at times funny and at others disturbingly insane, but the Office star also makes the protagonist sympathetic and easy to root for, for the most part.
Kick-Ass crushed Super at the box office, but the latter packed more emotional depth than the Mark Miller adaptation. Gunn harnessed the real-world setting to differentiate his project from standard comic fodder, while Kick-Ass mostly used it to score laughs.