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Take every flatulence joke you’ve ever heard. Add a couple of B-list actors. Gather a bunch of objects that can injure someone. Finally, top it all off with a pinch of humor. Then throw it all into a blender.
If, while you’re blending, the top of the blender flies off and the contents fly all over the room—after which the blades of the blender come loose and shoot off, nailing a passing old lady in the knee, and the plug shoots out of the wall, electrocuting a nearby cat—you’ll have Superhero Movie. It never smoothly combines all of its ingredients, but, fortunately, most of the individual ingredients still stand on their own to create a satisfying experience.
Superhero Movie is the latest in a long line of spoofs (like Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans) that mock successful films. In this installment, a boy named Rick Riker (Drake Bell) is bitten by a radioactive dragonfly and attains special powers. After he learns to control his powers, he creates a suit and becomes the Dragonfly.
At the same time, a rich tycoon, Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), gains a superpower of his own after suffering from a terminal disease. He becomes the Hourglass, able to turn people old with just the touch of his hand, and he devises a plan to destroy the city and gain immortality. The rest of the film follows Dragonfly in his attempt to win Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton), the girl of his dreams, while trying to save the city from the evil Hourglass.
Superhero Movie mainly makes fun of the Spider-Man trilogy, copying everything from the opening credits to the goofy remix of the Spidey soundtrack. It also includes gags from other superhero films, such as X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Batman Begins.
Superhero Movie accomplishes what it set out to do: to pack as many cheap laughs as possible into an hour and a half. Craig Mazin wrote and directed the movie, although he must have collaborated with The Three Stooges to come up with the incessant slapstick jokes. The film pairs incompetent characters with dangerous devices, such as nail guns, wood chippers, and laser beams, producing outlandish results. No need to worry about the safety of the characters, though; the injuries always heal before the next scene.
Plot is a term to be applied very loosely to Superhero Movie, as its main purpose is to bombard the audience with so many outrageous moments that they’ll forget about the story. Some jokes are hilarious, while others are mind-numbingly awful. But before you can complain about a bad joke, another joke has already come and gone.
Don’t see Superhero Movie if you’re looking for breakthrough cinematography, sharp editing, amazing acting, or meaningful dialogue. However, if farting grandmas, cymbal-clashing monkeys, and exploding parrots suit your film fancy, then Superhero Movie is your movie.
DVD Review (by Kristin Dreyer Kramer):
Backed by a whole clan of classic spoofsters, Superhero Movie manages to do what most modern spoofs don’t: it actually tells a story. And that makes it less like Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans and more like the classics—like Airplane! and The Naked Gun and Top Secret!
The Extended Edition DVD offers a bunch of the standard extras: a trailer, an alternate ending, a whole bunch of super-short deleted scenes (many of which were deleted for a pretty good reason), and an enlightening commentary with writer/director Craig Mazin and producers David Zucker and Robert K. Weiss. You’ll also find a couple of extra featurettes. The more interesting of the two, a feature called The Art of Spoofing, offers plenty of behind-the-scenes footage while writer/director Mazin—along with other cast and crew members—discusses the challenges (and the fun) involved in making a spoof.
Though the features don’t necessarily make the DVD a must-own, they’re worth perusing (especially the extended Tom Cruise scene). The movie, too, is well worth checking out—especially if you’re a fan of classic spoof movies.
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