If Kick-Ass just wasn't dark enough for you this should more than foot the bill. Special and Mystery Men are still my favorite regular-guys-as-super-heroes flicks but Super dares to go the extra mile in portraying just how bonkers vigilantism really is. Director James Gunn mines big laughs here from his cast who are clearly having a blast and even manages some pathos as well, though the film does end up feeling somewhat cobbled together by the end. A plot device involving religious visions doesn't work all that well here either but in the end Super emerges as a film I would see over and over again. The satire in the film is just too cogent in this day and age where every other headline makes me want to sew my suit and bash some heads with a wrench.
Frank D'Arbo (Rainn Wilson) is a man in desperate straits. His wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) has fallen off the wagon and into the arms of Jacques (Kevin Bacon) a smarmy wannabe drug lord. Unsure of what to do next he has a vision that leads him to become the Crimson Bolt, a vigilante superhero who makes up for his lack of superpowers by using a large wrench to fight crime. But just as the Crimson Bolt starts making headlines, Frank finds himself beholden to Libby (Ellen Page), a comic book store clerk and would be sidekick. Now side by side with Boltie, someone else with more heart than ability, he must assume the role of teacher. Will he win back his wife? Can Jacques be stopped? More importantly, what happens to two deluded but well meaning people when they finally have to confront the real world of guns and men with nothing to lose?
Rainn Wilson certainly channels Dwight Schrute here, but manages to make Frank into far more than a cardboard character. This is a man in need of a wake-up call who feels more responsibility to the world around him than Dwight ever would. Part of what makes Super work as well as it does is we sense that the righteousness of his cause just isn't a good enough reason for him to do what he does and we watch him wrestle with the consequences.
Ellen Page just about steals the show as the reckless merciless Libby/Boltie. People have criticized Page of late. Whip It and Inception both seemed like safe obvious career choices after her smart turns in Hard Candy and Juno. Inception, especially, gave her a, more or less, thankless supporting role in a story far more driven by it's Matrix-like folding of time and space than by offering her meaningful character development. But this role feels perfectly suited to her physically and emotionally even giving her the chance to lampoon the persona that people accuse her of mining too much, that of a smart-ass twenty-something who's recklessness may or may not prove her undoing.
Kevin Bacon, too, revels in the role of Jacques, a clueless but dangerous hoodlum. As written the character could have been a flat bit, the necesary point of conflict in a story centered on the hero. But as played by Bacon the character starts out almost sympathetic before devolving into exactly what we expect. Liv Tyler offers a solid performance as Sarah, the drug addict wife.
Super isn't unlike another underrated movie Observe and Report in which the dreams of individuals rise and fall against the indifference of society. Th violence in the film is startling, never letting the viewer off the hook. It's tempting to chalk that up to director Gunn's time in the trenches at Troma (Lloyd Kauffman even makes a cameo appearance here) but in the end the violence is what saves this film from irrelevance. Gunn's previous film Slither was a brilliantly funny 80's styled gross-out monster movie utilizing an incredible cast ( again Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker both make appearances here) but Super ramps up towards an ending that seems inevitable, tragic and finally surprisingly serious and hopeful. If Kick-Ass failed because it finally chose to embrace the unreality of what vigilantes could hope to accomplish Super succeeds by confronting the reality and hanging on to the soul of the man behind the mask.