Friday, April 1, 2011

Super is the type of film that is really going to surprise people. Not because it’s graphically violent (which it is) or creepily perverse (yes, yes it is) or because it involves a religious vision featuring tentacles and head cutting and super neon God fingers. Nope, because at its heart, it’s one of the sweetest movies you might stumble in to all year. James Gunn, with the help of a stellar cast really willing to wave the freak flag, creates a low-budget, truly personal film that rises out of its Troma-esque surface to be a truly special film.

Review - Super

Frank D’Arbo (Rainn Wilson) is a pretty average, God-fearing schlub, who somehow, someway, ended up married to the recovering alcoholic Sarah (Liv Tyler). She’s his everything, his reason to wake up in the morning. And then one day, lured by the presence of drugs and alcohol she shacks up with a sleazy drug dealer named Jacque (Kevin Bacon, using that angular face to fully embody creepiness). D’Arbo - Wilson really throwing it all out there in this one - collapses in to abysmal rejection, key above mentioned religious vision, and voila D’Arbo becomes a superhero named The Crimson Bolt. The Crimson Bolt isn’t some high-end Batman rip-off though, he’s just a man with a pipe looking to find his lady and bust some criminal head along the way. Unfortunately, he’s also borderline crazy. Wilson does a fine job of balancing D’Arbo’s silly, wild side (the side that yells things like, "Shut up crime!") with the obsessed, depressive lunatic that lurks beneath his custom-stitched costume. His violent wrench-beating spree at the beginning of the film is only matched by the appearance of his costumed sidekick Boltie (the always eleven, Ellen Page). Page is fine actress and her presence here made me smile and cringe, as her character dips in to the uncomfortable side of, well, many things, over and over again.

And discomfort is certainly what Gunn is shooting for here. Super excels as both a Troma-like gorefest (rife with creepy sex and random nudity) but the discomfort of the film truly lies in the emotional outpouring from Rainn Wilson’s Frank D’Arbo. There’s a cathartic feeling to Super that stems almost entirely from Wilson - his obsession with Sarah, his crippling Catholic guilt, his shifty-eyed awkwardness - and this sense of catharsis is what elevates the film from low-end enjoyable schlock-fest to less low-end, emotional gore-fest. There’s more here than just wrench-beating, sex, and exploding heads, there’s a seedy emotional core at play, and that’s what makes the film truly work.

- Noah Sanders -



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