SUPERHERO MOVIE

Craig Mazin Starring: Drake Bell, Leslie Nielsen, Sara Paxton, Christopher McDonald, Tracy Morgan, Marion Ross, Regina Hall, Pamela Anderson,Brent Spiner, Kevin Hart,Keith David, Dan Castellaneta Distributed by Momentum Pictures Film is released in the U.K. on June 6th 2008 Review by Michael Edwards

rating: 0.5

I want this sorted and I want it sorted now! Who the hell has been sodomising, raping , pillaging and generally breaking the commandments of whichever deity is in charge of here? Because this just isn't on. The " Movie" brand has returned to plague us once more and this is a plague that is doing immeasurable harm to our sanity. Craig Mazin, the man with a brain of a three year-old who penned such classics as SCARY MOVIE 3 and SCARY MOVIE 4, is bringing his sharp-witted and incisive brand of fart joke humour to bear upon the superhero movie, and he's dragged Pamela Anderson with him again. Bob Weiss is quoted in the production notes as saying "We realised that a good scouring of the the superhero genre hadn't really happened". This is true, there hasn't been a complete spoof of the genre on the big screen for as long as I can remember but what has confused me immensely is why these guys thought the best way to go about it was to re-enact scenes from several such films (SPIDER-MAN, X-MEN, FANTASTIC FOUR and a couple of others) but just exaggerate the features that are so obvious to all of us that all we can do in response is sit, yawn and agree that "yeah, superhero movies are a bit unbelievable in places aren't they?" Oh, wait, we knew that anyway! So the story of nerdy high school kid Rick Riker who is bitten by a genetically modified dragonfly on a school trip, and then goes on to fight his classmates uncle who is an evil supervillain isn't a witty parody at all, instead it is a morbidly dull re-enactment of everything that could potentially annoy you about these movies. I know I don't want to watch that. The worst thing about this film isn't even that it's really boring, it's that it thinks it's taking a chunk out of a Hollywood genre for kicks. There's nothing wrong with that when it works, but when it doesn't it's complete and utter cinematic carnage. But just to step back and assess the situation a little more fairly, superhero movies are a tricky thing to parody anyway: they're already supposed to be over-the-top and unrealistic, the whole appeal of these tails is that they're beyond the ordinary, providing unadulterated escapism which is frequently submerged in an orgy of special effects. So with this mutual pact between viewer and filmmaker in place it takes a really clever piece of mockery to dismantle it and it's painfully obvious that these guys weren't up to the task. The only other way to take advantage of a chink in its adamantium armour is to run with it completely and create something that's so out there and weird in its shiny abstract world that it is at once a distorted recreation of the ideals of the genre, and a kind of parody of its excesses (here I'm talking about camp classics like FLASH GORDON). But SUPERHERO MOVIE indulges itself far too often in the knowing wink, the 'we know better than them' attitude that they can't even get close to this angle. When all this is added to a pitiful repertoire of gags involve farts, shit and piss... in fact all bodily excretion, we are left with a film that isn't big or clever, and certainly isn't very funny. Please oh great lord of Hollywood, remove this plague from upon us. We'll be good. We promise.