Super (Jason’s Take) – Review

No one can deny that since Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, comic book adaptions have been the most profitable source of business in the entertainment world. I never thought I would see the day where almost every notable superhero would be transformed into a feature length film, and in some cases, they have been sequelized and are on the table to be rebooted. Talk about revenge of the nerds!

It has been a decade since Stan Lee’s mutants and webslinger mounted a turnaround after Joel Schumacher nearly killed it with his two cinematic abortions: Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. Like any genre of cinema, the bad will always outweigh the good, and the time for deconstructing the norm will be at hand.

What works best is taking the fantastic element of heroics out the door and replace it with gritty realism about bringing in regular folk who want to stop crime with tooth and nail, as opposed to running faster than a speeding bullet and becoming more powerful than a locomotive. Of course, that is the synopsis for most of these pictures, but Christopher’s Nolan’s two masterpieces proved that a man who starts from scratch and builds his identity from the ground up is what wins in the end.

Short order cook Frank D’Arbo’s (Rainn Wilson) pride and joy is his ex-addict wife Sarah (Liv Tyler), a woman who leaves him and returns to her vices full force as she is supplied with everything she needs from her new man Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Frank receives some divine intervention in the form of “The Finger of God”, which turns out to be a touch that literally gets his cranial juices flowing to go under the guise of the crime fighter The Crimson Bolt and throw down for the man upstairs. He is not the geek like most of us are, so he visits his local comic book store and get schooled from the cute as apple pie clerk  Libby (Ellen Page).

He constructs a home made suit and hits the streets and receives a beat down from some street thugs and the hoods who circle his wife. Frank realizes he needs a proper weapon and a sidekick ala Robin. With a pipe wrench in hand he bludgeons fear into the hearts of criminals, and adds sexy firepower in the form of a crazed Boltie, a transformed Libby who has his back as the two open a can of whoop ass on everyone in their path on way to rescuing Sarah.

As I sit here and type this review, I am somewhat perplexed by the screenplay from director James Gunn. There is a creed that states, “You are not supposed to molest children, cut lines or key cars.” Maybe if more time was spent going after the pedophiles of the world who deserve to get their ass beat down, and less on minor infractions, we might have had a keeper here. We are left with a vicious beating of a man who cuts in line at a theater and a guy who might or might not have keyed someone’s car. It’s all done in poor taste. Coming hot on the heels of Matthew Vaughn’s amazing Kick-Ass, The Crimson Bolt and Boltie come off as a poor man’s version of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.

I realize that this film was shot for a low budget, but the costumes are drab and look like something that was discarded in a dumpster after a taping of a segment of The Adventures of Handi-Man! on In Living Color. There is a moment where Boltie plays hot and horny and describes how wet she is down below as she wants to bump ugly with Bolt. That kind of stuff might work in a Troma movie or James Gunn’s classic creature feature Slither, but here it comes off very tacky seeing that Ellen Page has the look and body of a twelve-year old girl.

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