Superhero Movie

I very much wanted to like this film, if only to prove everyone else wrong, but alas it is pretty much as shallow and vapid as everyone expects it to be. If you saw Spiderman then this will be terribly familiar as it uses the old gag of ripping off entire pages of dialogue from one movie and transplanting it into another (see Airplane! for a good example of this). This unoriginal approach is the straitjacket that binds this average affair to the source material it attempts to parody.

To be fair there is plenty to laugh at initially - crude as the humour is, it was also effective in producing several chuckles from this humble reviewer. It also started well with a classic superhero cliché beginning in which every curve of the hero is followed in extreme close up – this rapidly becomes farcical (in a good way), all with a suitably dramatic theme tune blasting away. Just as it starts to become overdone we segue into what is more or less word for word and scene for scene the beginning of the first Spiderman film – with the "Who am I?" speech.

Without spoiling what are some of the genuinely funny parts of the film I can say that the first half of this film was entertaining and actually funny but it started to lose me when the running gag, not very funny the first ten times, continued to plague my senses and the hero’s life. Okay, we get it, he is incredibly clumsy! When a gag becomes boring it needs to stop. Someone must have forgotten to tell this to the perpetrators of this Scary Superhero Movie.

If you are going to see this, I advise that you stay for the credits, as a sequence of ‘outtakes’ appears which is arguably the funniest part of the latter half – if not of the whole movie.

The acting was decent, visually it looked okay and the music was functional. I really have not much else to say – if you want to rent this with your buddies to watch while imbibing some fine domestic beer then do so, but this is really straight to DVD material and the second half drags along the ground worse than The Lizard's tail.