Super Review

• 2nd Jul 2011

James Gunn’s Super is a film with skin that feels familiar. It’s the story of an everyman driven by various forces to take up arms against the evils of the world – where an ordinary man decides that the world needs a real superhero to defend the weak, so dons mask and costume and seeks out crime and iniquity in his neighbourhood. The meat and bones, however, are quite different. Rainn Wilson’s Frank is no cheeky teen with fried nerve endings, nor is he an over-resourced winged freak – he’s an under-achieving, overweight grill chef whose bleak life comes crashing down when a drug dealer ensnares his beautiful wife, thereby removing the one source of happiness in his otherwise bleak life. Frank’s decision to become the wrench-wielding Crimson Bolt comes as a reaction to Liv Tyler’s Sarah abandoning their marriage and disappearing into the shady of world of Jacques’ (a suitably sleazy Kevin Bacon). Spurred on by Nathan Fillion’s preposterous TV character, The Holy Avenger, on a believably shoddy Christian TV channel, Frank comes to believe God has chosen him for a special mission. His lack of knowledge in the superhero department is supplemented by the irrepressible Libby (Ellen Page) who works at the local comic book shop. As she walks him through the non-super-powered superheroes, his new secret persona begins to take shape.

With an ingrained set of moral codes, Frank, as the Crimson Bolt, sets about becoming a superhero, finding drug dealers, paedophiles and queue jumpers and enacting his own particular brand of justice on them. This justice widely takes the form of smashing them in the face with a huge wrench. Sounds funny. It is. It’s also really quite wrong. There’s a vicious realism to the beatings that somehow seems more extreme than shooting or stabbing or other much more fatal methods of executing vengeance. It’s this juxtaposition of humour and darkness that makes the film the oddity that it is. Frank’s utter helplessness in his everyday life makes the brutality of his vigilante attacks that much more jarring. Similarly Libby’s desperate joy in becoming Boltie and her utter delight at causing severe harm – even death – is really quite shocking.

The dark heart of the film is almost entirely encapsulated by a scene with Frank praying. Heart wrenching and filled with misery, kneeling before his empty bed, Frank laments his miserable life, his face, his entire appearance and pleads to his god for Sarah to love him. We’re struck with guilt for laughing at him for being everything he’s describing, yet the sheer naive simplicity that leads him to beg for help in this way makes us laugh all over again. This is Frank at his most raw, and yet he is still humorous. Ellen Page’s previous performances work extremely well in the film’s favour. We know that she’s quick-tongued and foul-mouthed; we also know she’s funny and charming. What we get here from Page as Libby is someone without any real idea of social boundaries. Where Frank is childlike and forlorn with a touch of the psychotic, Libby is childlike and almost purely psychotic. From her semi-obsession with Frank to her jubilation at bloody violence perpetrated, Libby’s understanding of social norms is far from usual.

Super is much darker than I was expecting. Not Nolan’s Batman dark, but dark in a sad, pathetic kind of way. There are no gruff millionaires, no sexy gadgets; there are only grey streets, old cars and lonely people. The overall tone is downright inconsistent and while this sounds like a negative, it’s actually what makes the film so absorbing. Continually dragged between laughing and crying by the dreadful pathos and sick humour, Gunn has woven characters with so much heart and so much weird humanity it’s impossible not to love them, laugh at them and be shocked by them. I really don’t want all this to make Super sound like the kind of tear-jerking, naval-gazing twaddle I would generally avoid. It’s bloody violent, bloodily violent in fact, and Frank’s wrench attacks are hilarious. Likewise, the weird factor is a joy to behold, where shades of Monty Python are mixed with Gunn’s love for all things tentacled (see Slither. No really, see Slither; it’s brilliant). Libby’s keenness for violence is funny as well as disturbing and I laughed a whole lot more than at most straight up comedies I’ve seen recently. What I want to try to stress is an idea of the peculiar bitter-sweetness that sits at the heart of the Super; it’s disturbing and funny and a quite remarkable film.

Hannah Turner