Super? More Like Mediocre

I want to like the movie Super, starring Rainn Wilson and Ellen Paige, more than I do. I want to believe that there's some sort of cohesive message in this movie's garbled set of images and dialogue. The writer and director, Mr. James Gunn, probably feels he has communicated a statement about violence-glorification in American media and personal growth, but I just don't see it.

Rainn Wilson is Frank, who acts pretty much like Dwight Schrute would if he were a short-order cook married to Liv Tyler instead of a paper salesman. Liv Tyler is disenchanted with her marriage, and so enters Jacques/Jock, portrayed by the ever-enjoyable Kevin Bacon. He's a drug pusher and pimp and he has a malicious hold over Ms. Tyler. She is a recovering drug addict, though she's not very good at the whole “recovery” thing, and she ditches Mr. Wilson in favor of her new paramour/drug dispensary. This rightly upsets our hero, enough that he has a religious epiphany starring Nathan Fillion in which he decides to become a superhero named the Crimson Bolt who whacks baddies with a wrench. “Baddies” in this case range from child molesters to people who cut in line at a movie theater. Yep.

He's eventually joined in his quest for righteous retribution by Ellen Paige, a 22-year-old comic store employee who has a weird sexual fetish for Mr. Wilson's superhero persona. Together they fight, and simultaneously perpetrate, crime. Eventually the obligatory happy ending is achieved, despite this being labeled as a “dark” comedy. Insert eye-roll here.

My displeasure with this film stems firstly from its inconsistency regarding its fetishistic use of violence. Mr. Wilson is not a particularly nice guy; in fact he's a pretty selfish bastard. Okay, viewers can buy that. Not all protagonists need to be shining avatars of goodness, and there's this faux-existentialist, quasi-nihilist malaise that seems to afflict most of our protagonists in recent years. He's, first and foremost, devoted to his wife (can't fault him that, I suppose) and, second, to upholding “the rules.” The problem is that he is a great big hypocrite about those selfsame rules, especially when it comes to rescuing his wife from the clutches of the nefarious Kevin Bacon. If it's okay for him to break the norms of society in pursuit of his own interests, how can it be justified that other people are in the moral wrong for doing the things for which they, apparently, deserve punishment? The movie never addresses this ethical knot and it doesn't do a particularly good job of comparing Frank's moral situation vis-a-vis his victims', though it does a whole hell of a lot of contrasting.

Second, there's the matter of Boltie. Ellen Paige did a marvelous job portraying the stereotypical annoying kid sidekick. At one point near the end of the movie some events occur and something life-changing happens to Boltie and, by extension, the Crimson Bolt. During the film's denouement, a whole hell of a lot of time and attention is given to Frank and his wife's life-situations, but none to the fallout of what befell Boltie. This happens after it was emphasized more than once that there exist real-life repercussions for Crimson Bolt and Boltie's antics, up to and including police investigation of the vigilantism. Leaving such a gross plot thread unresolved by the credits is more than merely unsatisfying; it's outright lazy. There's also the little matter of her, at one point, raping Frank. You read right. Last I checked, rape was not something to be condoned, but Frank takes to the act with considerable aplomb once he goes through a superficial resistance phase. More of that “it's ethical when I or my buddies do it” moralizing, I guess? Or there's an exception to the “rape is bad” rule when it's girl-on-guy? The incident, at any rate, is forgotten by both parties by the time the next scene opens.

Maybe, just maybe, my critiques are in fact what the director wanted to achieve with this film. Maybe he was less concerned with creating verisimilitude in his fiction and more intent on exploring the metafiction of the vigilante superhero genre through calling out its inherent inconsistencies. But if that was his intent, it was done clumsily. He played too many other tropes straight when he should have deconstructed and subverted nearly all of them, and what resulted was a confusing clusterfuck that feels as if it came from the second draft of a script rather than a polished, tight final product. There exist worse movies, to be sure, but a positive, must-see recommendation for Super is not something I feel I can give. Give it a go if you're specifically craving a superhero deconstruction film and are sick of Watchmen, but be aware the movie's title in no way describes the quality of its contents.