Super

"I wonder all the time why no one's ever stepped up and become a real superhero," says overenthusiastic comic-book clerk Ellen Page midway through James Gunn's Super. The answer is that plenty of people have—regular-folk antecedents to Rainn Wilson's Crimson Bolt include (off the top of my head) Woody Harrelson in Defendor, that kid in Kick-Ass, much of the cast of Watchmen, and Portland's own caped crusader Zetaman—though the vigilante ancestor Gunn really wants to summon is Travis Bickle. Super plays like a geek-chic Taxi Driver, if Martin Scorsese couldn't decide whether the Schrader script was some kind of sick joke, and if he superimposed the killing of Sport with cartoon balloons reading "BANG!" and "POW!" Like Travis, Wilson's Frank is lonely, insomniac and paranoid, with a fixation on saving a woman from predators she may prefer to him. Unlike Travis, Frank wears a bright-red jumpsuit and a mask. "Other people stare at me, God, I can tell," he prays, weeping uncontrollably beside his bed. Of course they do: He's the only one here.

That scene of self-loathing prayer is truly distressed and affecting—probably the best work Wilson has ever done, including The Office. In between that and Super's climax, however, there's about an hour of patience-testing, smug and ugly filler, the kind of superior comedy that asks us to laugh at the Crimson Bolt driving around in a Buick beater and thwacking miscreants (a weed dealer, a pedophile, a guy who cuts in line at the movies) over the head with a giant wrench. Mourning the departure of his wife (Liv Tyler) into the arms of a vice peddler (a marvelously sleazy Kevin Bacon), he can't distinguish between crime and personal affront, a problem only exacerbated when he takes on Page as a sidekick. This terrifying imp, who dubs herself Boltie, commits vehicular homicide, then taunts her victims with the laugh of an overcaffeinated hyena. (She also initiates a costumed sex scene even creepier than the one in Watchmen.) Super expects us to find this stuff unsettling but funny—because these protagonists, while sociopaths, live in a small town and believe in Jesus and don't know anything about Batman and tee hee hee.

But in its final 15 minutes, Super makes a leap from violence into ultraviolence—and becomes harder to dismiss. As in 2006's overlooked Slither, Gunn proves himself adroit with gore, and applies it liberally. We're talking about the kind of staved-in heads and spilled innards most associated with '70s exploitation reels; I really can't remember a recent mainstream picture with such a queasy-making level of brutality. At the same time, Gunn starts taking Frank's moral position—it's something like George Costanza's old cry, "We're living in a society!"—fairly seriously, at least as a perverse thought experiment. It isn't enough to make me admire the movie, exactly, but it is evidence that something is redeemed through bloodshed, anyway.

 58 SEE IT: Super opens Friday at Cinema 21.

WWeek 2015