Why The Fuck Haven’t You Seen…SUPER!?

 So you never got around to seeing SUPER, eh?  Thought it looked too much like KICK-ASS maybe?  Gimme a break.  You went and saw two movies about asteroids destroying the Earth, and two movies about Volcanoes destroying the Earth, and who knows how many movies about the Wachowski Brothers Siblings destroying the Earth.  Besides, does watching a man decide to be a superhero because his head gets tentacle raped by the fingertip of God sound like KICK-ASS?

Aw shit, did I just lose you?

The anemic sub $400K theatrical returns were meager even for a flick that was clearly meant to make its bones on DVD.  So all the people putting on their Crimson Bolt mask on Facebook failed to get their asses into the theater, and the general public never got interested enough to be curious about the wildly insane and largely unspoiled content.

So why should you care now?  Short answer, the movie is outrageous and blissful insanity mixed with genuine pathos and heart.  The more complex reasons have to do with calibrating your expectations now that Marvel has given director James Gunn the keys to their weirdest Phase 2 vehicle – GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.

[Quick aside about GOTG: I’ve never seen so many people have an opinion on how to handle a property they’d never fucking heard of before.]

Anyway, watching SUPER it should be totally clear why he got the nod, and it’s because Gunn as both a screenwriter and director does something very rare in Hollywood.  He takes conventions that are so well known that we no longer even recognize them as conventions, and then does something radical – he writes scenes that make sense.  You know that feeling of dread you get sometimes watching a film; the one you don’t even know why it’s there?  That’s your lame’o meter.  It goes off when you know a plot contrivance is going to ask you to turn off your brain.

Gunn hates that shit.  When one of his characters gets shot in the leg, that character is going to keep limping for the rest of the movie.  When people are shooting guns, the people they are aiming at get hit with bullets.  A bad guy can have a nice streak, and a good guy can show violently poor judgement.  One of my favorite scenes in SUPER is when our hero changes into his Crimson Bolt costume in his car and the dude he’s coming to fight calls him out on it.

You may be getting the vibe that Gunn’s stuff could be called quirky.  And it is after a fashion.  Hell, this is the guy that turned Scrappy-Doo into an evil bastard so that we could all finally enjoy watching that smarmy pup get his ass handed to him.  But you have to be careful with quirky.  Quirky without heart and you get RDJ in SHAGGY DOG.  Quirky with heart and you get RDJ in IRON MAN.  No matter how off the rails the events or subject matter in SUPER gets (middle age man costume raped by a horny psychotic teen, anyone?) what holds it all together is heart.

The characters care deeply about the choices they make and the people they welcome into their lives.  When it comes down to it, Gunn is a deeply sentimental filmmaker, no matter how much he hides it behind Satan turning high schoolers into fetish whores, and girls with blown off faces.  I also love that he looks at what might cause a real person to go from imaging fighting crime as a super hero to actually doing it. Spoiler Alert: It rhymes with schmental schmillness.

Outside of the rabid fan boys and girls who follow Gunn’s every move like a spiky haired Jesus, I heard far too many people write off SUPER as derivative or unnecessary without ever having fucking seen it.  It’s neither.

So if you haven’t seen SUPER you’re probably a: pussy/ass/DICK/boob

So fix that shit and go watch it!