He’s a nerd, a fool, a social outcast, a murderer and yet a hero. It doesn’t make much sense, but then it isn’t supposed to.

Superhero is, thankfully, an 85-minute movie that intentionally makes no sense. The movie is made purely for laughs. According to the production notes, writer-director Craig Mazin, who has worked on other spoofs like Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, says, “These movies are about going into a theatre and laughing consistently through eighty or ninety minutes.”

Superhero is a typical superhero movie, except that things never go the way they’re supposed to and the people in the movie aren’t exactly thinking straight. Oh, and nothing in the movie is original, unless you count when things go wrong.

The Plot

Rick Riker, the protagonist, was a loser. His rich parents were murdered like Batman’s, he was brought up like Spiderman , and later, he could fly like Superman. Ricker was a social outcast, and in love with Jill, the girlfriend of the school’s biggest bully. And predictably, Ricker was bitten by an insect on a field trip and was bestowed with superpowers a la Spiderman.

But what makes the movie so different is that Ricker didn’t magically transform into a superhero immediately. Ricker was still a loser, after being bestowed with superpowers, accidentally killing an old lady while he was trying to use his superpowers to save her.

Doubts about his ability to help mankind gnawed at Ricker, and the people surrounding him didn’t make things easier for him. His grandfather told him to do his parents proud, at which point we also get a peek at Ricker’s past.

Of course, what’s a superhero movie without a villain and having to conquer a fear? As the Dragonfly, the name he chose as his alter ego, Ricker’s favourite whine was that he couldn’t fly, only to be told that he had to conquer and accept himself before he could truly be a hero. Now, doesn’t it remind you of Superman?

The Acting

Superhero is a movie that is both ridiculous and hilarious, the actors say their lines with dead-serious sincerity but it is the audience, in Producer David Zucker’s own words, that is filling in the jokes. The movie is fun because the audience is entertained when they see things that happened in real-life appearing in the movie. Hence they are tickled when Miles Fisher appeared as Tom Cruise to do an eerily uncanny but still hilarious imitation of the actor’s flamboyant mannerisms in a re-enactment of the infamous couch-bouncing interview.

Unfortunately, Miles Fisher is by far one of the best and most convincing actors out of the lot, together with Leslie Nielsen , who played Riker’s uncle Albert Adams, and Marion Ross, as Riker’s aunt Lucille Adams. Both of them are larger than life in their deadpan roles of well meaning but unfortunately well detached from reality relatives of Riker. The same could not be said for the rest of the actors though; most of them grimaced their way through the movie as if they could not wait for it to end.

The Verdict

The movie made fun of just about everything under the sun; Rick Riker’s best friend getting shot with a nail wasn’t exactly funny but it still invoked startled laughter from the audience, that the audience is kept in helpless laughter practically all the time. Superhero borrowed its plot from many different movies, from the well-known superhero movies to the less well-known Attack on the Pin-up Boys, but that only makes the movie funnier.

To be honest, the movie is anything but unimaginative, not in terms of the plot of course, but with all the digs at celebrities and trends. Sure, the plot was practically a cut-and-paste from other superhero movies, but nobody said anything about going in to watch it for the plot. The movie is about going to have mindless fun laughing at the crude jokes and hilarious parodies. It’s a spoof, if you have not forgotten that.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Movie Details

Opens: 24 Apr 2008

Movie Rating: PG

Running Time: 85 mins

Language: English

Director: Craig Mazin

Cast: Drake Bell, Sara Paxton, Christopher Mcdonald, Leslie Nielsen, Marion Ross