 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Super • Year: 2010 • Country: USA • Director: James Gunn • Main cast: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon • Runtime: 96 min • Production company: This Is That Productions, Ambush Entertainment • TRAILER |
Super appeared on 2010, directed by James Gunn, recently known for directing Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-2017), but with quite a career as script writer for films as Dawn of the Dead (2004). He brought us a charismatic movie with an original story and a collection of loser characters (difficult to say who’s the most failure of them all) that not only entertains but stays in your mind.
One of the things that makes the movie special (and I must say, put me in a mood of confusion after watching it) is this mixture between comedy and drama, where you sometimes don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and that makes you wonder at the end what you’ve just watched. The characters get one way or another related to the crime world, and we lose the thin line that separates good and bad actions, crazy and worst decisions. Just like in real life, the action-reaction laws of physics affect on them, they’re products of society as we can be, pushed to parody like in an extreme realism portrait.
The influence of comic and superhero stories is a departure point that articulates the transformation of Frank Darbo (brilliantly interpreted by Rainn Wilson) when he realises he needs to make a change in his life (in the character he plays daily) in order to save his wife from bad influences. He’s a complete wretch, like anyone of us can be, but still he needs to find the strength to become a superman, to become Crimson Bolt, someone that can fight against crime, someone that, unlike police, cares enough for his wife to do crazy things for saving her. Because again, love is the greatest of motors, and it doesn’t need to come in beautiful envelopes. The most current, simple man, the most loser, can feel love and try to become a super for love. And here’s where Crimson Bolt appears, after some research, this mask that we need sometimes to feel we have the power to do certain things we though we couldn’t. A similar thing happens with Libby’s character (a great performance by Ellen Page) who’s introduced as a bit neurotic bookseller who also finds the chance becoming his sidekick to explode her rage agains the world and accomplish her wild fantasies.
Appeared the same year as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) from director Edgar Wright, and a year later than Defendor (2009), it explores like them different approaches to the classical superhero, from a much more human and realistic point of view, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, where the hero is a loser that uses a disguise to become someone else and change for the better others’ lives.
RATE: 7/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512235
