Hey folks, Harry here with another review out of Toronto from the Midnight Madness screening of James Gunn's SUPER! Yes please. Want to see. Here's Supergirl...
Hey Harry, just in case you wanna use this. For a film as awesome as SUPER, you can never have enough. If you use it, identify me as Supergirl! Here it is: Hey - fuck Kick-Ass anyway. Don't get me wrong: I loved the toes offa that film. But did it have Rainn Wilson beating a man into a coma with a pipe wrench, just for cutting ahead in line at the movies? No. No it did not. In Super, Wilson plays a losery Jesus freak named Frank who suffers a complete psychotic break and thinks that God touched his brain with the power to become a superhero. Frank re-fashions himself as the Crimson Bolt, an ad hoc crimefighter wearing a red body stocking that does truly look like a losery Jesus freak made it in his living room using sewing equipment he'd never touched before. Pipe-wrench-enforced vigilante mania ensues. Writer/director James Gunn says he wrote the script for Super seven years ago and never really changed it, and it shows; it's loose and sloppy, working in fits and starts - too many of the former, and not enough of the latter. Super doesn't really catch fire until the Crimson Bolt picks up a sidekick/hanger-on/fellow sociopath named Libby, who declares herself "Boltie" and is played to the nines (and tens and elevens) by Ellen Page. Page doesn't just save the movie; she tears the roof off the theatre, steals the whole film, and runs away cackling. Playing a dumber, meaner, hella crazier version of her clever girl persona, Page is a rampaging psychosexual berserker in Sprite colours and a Riddler mask. She gets the best lines, the best fights, the best fuck, the second-best costume, and the single filthiest line reading I've seen since the early works of John Waters. The words "it's all gushie" will haunt me until death. The film needs a tighter edit to really finesse the comedy, and its pound-you-over-the-head-with-a-wrench Christian moralizing is just downright creepy. It goes for immensely dark jokes on occasion, half of which land, half of which don't. But the balls on this thing, the sheer exploitationist zeal, is infectious. It knows what it's trying to do, and it has a mountingly enjoyable time doing it grinds towards its flat-out batshit finale. And I must say, as white rabbits go, Nathan Fillion in a Jesus supersuit is going to stand high on the list for a long, long time. Hello, world? A request: action figures of Crimson Bolt, Boltie, and the Holy Avenger, please. And thank you.
