Super (2011)

Writer and Director: James Gunn

After the breakaway success of James Gunn’s debut feature film Slither, he returns to his first script, Super, a violent and esoteric look on the concept of superheroes as applied to real life. Conceived back in 2002 but quickly falling into production hell, Super suffers grievously due to irrelevance, finally seeing the light of day in an era of superhero fatigue, and shadowing a much more high-budget Kick-Ass. For the rare few who actually witnessed it however, it provides a rather unique and stunning piece of cinema, with a much more blatant and disturbing agenda than Kick-Ass ever intended.

Fast food cook Frank (Rainn Wilson) has only ever had two perfect memories in his life. The first was when he married his wife Sarah (Liv Tyler), recovering from a terrible drug addiction. The second was when, as a child, he directed a police officer in his pursuit of a fleeing robber. These two events have been transformed into crayon drawings that Frank has hung over his bed in order to wake up to them each day.

Frank returns home one day to find his wife has left him for cult-leader-like Jacques (Kevin Bacon in a warm-up role for X-Men: First Class), a charismatic strip club owner, who has initiated her relapse into drugs. Distraught, Frank becomes a wreck of a man, resorting to daytime television. Whilst watching hardcore Christian programming, he witnesses The Holy Avenger, a masked Nathan Fillion smiting teen pregnancy and peer pressure-provoking demons in an American High School, complete with an inspirational message about the triumph of good over evil, invoking nostalgic memories of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is here that he proclaims to have been touched by God, if God can be described lucid visions of tentacle rape and a lobotomy.

Donning the homemade mask, Frank becomes the Crimson Bolt! A superhero without powers, brutally clubbing people to death with a wrench. Commit a crime? Crimson Bolt will stop you! Molest a child? Prepare to meet your doom! Cut in queue? Smash your face in! Together with his 22-year-old kid sidekick Boltie – sadistic comic book store clerk Libby (Ellen Page), the Crimson Bolt vows to fight crime, get back his wife, and foil Jacques’ drug circle.

The realism in Super is both gruesome and compelling, setting the film apart from any other superhero story so far, even the ones that claim super realism like Kick-Ass and Watchmen. With no real abilities, Frank initially struggles to defeat anyone, until he begins his sneak-attacks, embedding his wrench in people’s skulls multiple times beyond their deaths. The Crimson Bolt and Boltie unleash judgement without mercy or restraint, breaking spines, smashing glass eyes, immolating people, and ramming a thug against a wall with their “Bolt-mobile”, leaving him to slowly writhe in agony until death. Their motivations are clear: Frank because due to his ineptness and social retardation, he doesn’t know any other way to get his wife back; and Libby because she enjoys it, laughing sadistically as she lacerates an already-dead thug’s body with homemade Wolverine claws.

Super also alludes to what happens “between the panels”. Kick-Ass stirred up a storm with its portrayal of underage kid sidekick Hit-Girl. Super goes beyond, and although Boltie is 22-years-old, wearing her costume during her rape of Frank as The Crimson Bolt, proclaiming that this is now what she needs to get off, comes off as disturbingly paedophilic in nature.

Super is a unique take on the now mundane concept of what it would be like to be a superhero in real life. However, it sets itself apart by going further than any other similar film, not shying away from what it could be like to kill someone with a homemade weapon, or the psychopathic and sociopathic thoughts that might drive a modern-day vigilante. Its low-budget nature means that it doesn’t have the luxuries of other blockbuster superhero films, but this charm parallels nicely with the homemade nature of The Crimson Bolt. “Take that crime, you shit!”

4 / 5