SUPERHERO MOVIE
US, 2008, 75 minutes, Colour.
Drake Bell, Leslie Nielsen, Sara Paxton, Christopher Mc Donald, Kevin Hart, Keith David, Robert Hays, Robert Joy, Jeffrey Tambor, Brent Spiner, Tracy Morgan.
Directed by Craig Mazin.
After all the Scary/Date/Not Another Teenage/Epic Movie spoofs, plus Meet the Spartans, we know, more or less, what to expect from these send-ups of popular films and anything else that comes to the screenwriter’s or director’s mind.
They are corny, inexpensive skits with a functional lookalike cast (but this time we also have Leslie Nielson as well as Uncle Albert with some really crass remarks in Nielson’s deadpan style), some really corny jokes, quite a number of bodily function jokes, some spot-on satire and generally a hit or miss approach to the humour. They are short and the custom is to have about ten minutes of more plot and a number of out-takes after the final credits, much of which is often funnier than the film. Here the out-takes seem like an alternate (and sometimes better) screenplay.
Not so long after Meet the Spartans and the send-up of 300 (and a lot of US TV shows), we now have a poke at the Spiderman series, a key-scene from Batman Begins, an X- Men interlude and a dollop of the Fantastic Four. Needless to say, Drake Bell as our hero, Rick Riker (instead of Peter Parker), is not the most super of superheroes. On a school tour, he is bitten by a genetically-engineered dragonfly and becomes Dragonfly, a Spiderman would-be, except he can’t fly. (This leads to some interviews with celebrities about flying, the best one being with a Tom Cruise impersonator – he looks the part and is really one of the best imitators for a long time – and there is more of his work in the out-takes than in the film itself, which is a real bonus.) Robert Joy is the Stephen Hawking parody – heavy but clever.
Sarah Paxton plays the Kirsten Dunst lookalike and follows the Spiderman scenario quite closely as does Rick Riker’s aunt. The villain gets a lot of time and some good lines and is played by Christopher Mc Donald for even more than it is worth. Needless to say, he is an evil scientist.
The flashback to Rick’s ineptitude in causing the deaths of his parents is a spoof of Batman Begins. And the tour of Professor Xavier’s academy gets some parody of the X- Men films.
As usual, you have to have seen the originals to follow these parodies and to appreciate whether the jokes hit their mark or not. Not a really great laugh-out-loud film (except in the post-credits material) but amusingly silly.
