Super

Saw Super. It was another deconstruction of the superhero genre, this also mixes the absurd fantasy of a crime-fighting man in tights with the grim reality of a pipe-wrench to the head. This is a dark comedy in the style of Taxi Driver or Leon The Professional. It stars Frank, a dude who has never gotten any respect. When his wife runs off with her drug dealer, he super-heroes up in an effort to gain control of his life and... he still doesn't get any respect. He's alternately mocked or feared by everyone. It is explicitly stated that he is a lunatic. His only ally is a girl who is somehow yet crazier than him and who regards him not as a person but as some sort of fantastic dream-come-true.

Anyway, if you can stomach the relative grimness of it, the film is pretty crowd-pleasing. It stars an ugly and crazy person who we are first made to identify with and then to marvel at, like a bug on a watch glass. This feels exploitative and caters largely to our basal instincts to leer at the outre and violent, but this is supposed to be a satire so this is par for the course. For what it's worth, I think the side-kick character is an excellent use of satire. She cackles madly as she murders people and we the audience are cackling right along with her even as we are repulsed by her madness. There's a lot of fantasy/reality clashes. At one point the protagonist's wife is told that she's just parroting what she thinks she should be saying, which she's picked up from TV shows. The protagonist's visions contain many references to TV shows he watches. Indeed, for a comic-book movie, mostly the film uses TV as a pop-culture shorthand. I suppose this is Hollywood writing what it knows.

I don't really have much to say about this film. I liked it okay. It's violent, entertaining, has some clever thoughts about superheroes, is largely condemning of the idea (I think.) It's much what I expected, so it wasn't terribly surprising, but then I also expected it to be pretty entertaining which it is, so there you are. A fun film. Not the most subtle and it is, ultimately, only about masked super-folk, so it's not like its revealing trenchant truths about the human condition, but then who expected it to anyway.