What Makes a Great Superhero Movie?

A few hours ago I plunked myself down in a movie theater, 3D glasses on nose, popcorn and diet coke to hand, ready to watch an action movie that got 93% on Rotten Tomatoes - The Avengers.

And I was bored. The movie was packed with great actors doing fine work. The characters had depth and interactions. The casting was inspired (Mark Ruffalo is a perfect Hulk). The writer and director, Joss Whedon, is a favorite of mine. No expense was spared. Why was it so flat for me? What is it that I want in a superhero movie?

Rollercoaster ride action
Action needs to have some punch for the viewer. Surprise me. I remember when I saw the first Jurassic Park, I had to sit up straight and tuck in my legs because I kept involuntarily kicking out when a dinosaur sneezed or bit someone's head off. That was great!

It's not like we're really worried that Thor is going to die when he plunges 30,000 feet in a glass cage. We know he's going to survive. We need some chills and thrills, or at least some arresting visuals. The 3D actually interfered with that because everyone looked so teeny tiny on the screen, like little GI Joe dolls.

Plot, please
This movie kept telegraphing that the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were manipulating the superheroes into becoming a fighting force on behalf of mankind, and then the ending was -surprise!- that the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had manipulated the superheroes into becoming a fighting force on behalf of mankind. Other than that, the plot was verrrrry thin.

Hello, romance!
Or bromance. Or fromance. The season finale of The Big Bang Theory had more human resonance than The Avengers, and it's about a bunch of Aspergery geeks.

Focus
This movie had so many main characters that I didn't come to care about any of them. If we have to have all six Avengers, couldn't we emphasize some over the others? Or see the events from the perspective of one of them? This felt like equal time had to be given to each of the dozen movie stars.

Bring back the auteur
Like the last Batman movie, this felt like something created by a committee. Just because it's an action movie doesn't mean it can't have vision and passion. Like Back to the Future or the Matrix movies or the Tim Burton Batmans or the first Iron Man. You know you're going to make a billion dollars in the first week, but why not pour your heart into it and make it art? (We all know the answer to that: in Hollywood, money is the only measure of success. But Joss Whedon should know better.)

I've heard the complaints that there are too many superhero movies. I don't agree. I'm aware that ever since Disney bought Marvel the brand has become a hollow copy of its previous hollow copy of its golden days in the 1960s. I still think we can have (and that we deserve!) great superhero movies. I remember the first time I saw Kill Bill Part One: when the last line was delivered I hopped out of my seat and punched my fist in the air and whooped. That's what I want.

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Anthony Lane Review (review)

Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Kick-Ass bugs me - not because he hated the movie and I dug it, although that's true - but because his objections are rooted in the main character being an 11 year old girl.

Lane has various problems with the character who calls herself Hit Girl. He thinks her swearing is a cheap trick to generate buzz. He thinks her presence turns the movie into "cartoon violence" and makes the movie appeal to children. He thinks that viewing it will make children mistake savagery for slapstick and so "coarsen and inflame" them. Underlying all his other criticism, he thinks she's pornographic. While not being able to provide any evidence, Lane is preoccupied with her sexuality; he even says that she is "the dream of every pedophile."

To be clear: the little girl in question doesn't dress provocatively. She doesn't act provocatively. There's nothing sexual about her. If the actress had been 12 or 13 she might have had budding sexuality, but Hit Girl is thoroughly a child.

Lane tries to argue the pornography angle by saying that that the difference between a sexualized child and a violenc-ized child is a "false dichotomy" and a "cowardly distinction". I think he's engaged in some fuzzy thinking there. There is most definitely a difference between a child who is sexualized and one who is violent: there is no child-violence-voyeur equivalent of a pedophile.

There is one major similarity between children who are sexualized and who are violenc-ized: both situations give the child a sense of empowerment but are ultimately damaging to them. But for a pulp fiction movie, the movie is very sensitive to the child's problems. The movie makes it clear that this is one very damaged little girl. She was raised by an insane revenge-obsessed father who made killing a game. When we first see father and daughter, they are standing in a culvert and he is repeatedly shooting her in the chest with a large hand gun (we then learn he's teaching her to get used to her new bullet-proof vest). At the end, she is placed in a safer environment.


The difference between a movie about a sexualized little girl (and there have been many, from Lolita to Pretty Baby to Taxi Driver and on and on) and a movie about a violenc-ized little girl, is that millions of little girls are sexualized but few in the Western world are turned into Ninja fighters. There isn't a social issue here.

There is shock/novelty value. There may have been an 11 year old pig-tailed assassin in fiction before, but I can't recall when. And Lane is right that the Hit Girl character might appeal to kids - but this is an R-rated movie. As long as a movie is rated appropriately, I don't see how you can criticize its effect on kids.

I can't believe that Lane would have had such strong objections to violenc-izing a little boy. His review, at heart, is just old-fashioned disapproval of girls being action heroes. And he's really, really bothered about it - to the point that he expresses disgust with people who disagree with him - and to the point that he misses the good stuff in the movie.

The actress who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Moretz, has an impressive resume even though she was 11 at time of filming, and she did a brilliant acting job. When she says "Oh daddy, I'm just fuckin with ya", it's a show-stopper. She doesn't swear much in the movie, but when she does it's the best swearing I ever heard. She is convincing in a role that most actors would make laughable.

On top of all this, Lane and many of the other reviewers I read just don't get the movie. It's about the yearning and futility of wanting to be more than you can be. The character who calls himself Kick-Ass wears a baggy mail-order Hallowe'en costume and makes zero progress in becoming a superhero. He has a wealthy classmate who is able to buy a more convincing costume but does no better at the superheroing. Hit Girl is the closest we get to a human superhero, but she's ultimately just a little kid who's over-eager to please her dad. Even at the closest they get, when Kick-Ass dons a jet pack and flies himself and Hit Girl across the city, they have still failed to cross the line between being a superhero and just pretending.

In the short form of the review that appears in later New Yorkers, Lane writes that Kick-Ass "has the makings of a pointed - and much needed - poke at comic book afflatus, but the satire backs away all too quickly." Again, he misses the point. Superhero movies tend to play with the edges of the genre, exploring it and examining its internal flaws, but you shouldn't expect them to satirize and criticize the genre. The superhero genre simply isn't serious enough for satire to have any relevance.

Except for her age, Hit Girl is has a lot of similarities to Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, and Kick-Ass owes a lot to Kill Bill. If I hadn't liked Kick-Ass I might have thought it was too derivative. But I wouldn't have blamed it on the kid.

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All the Best Superheroes in the World, Defeated in One Fell Swoop

Disney Buys Marvel

Without emitting a single particle beam or firing a single nuclear blast, the greatest comic empire of all time has been sucked into the vortex of hell. In a day when "Disneyfication" is widely used to mean "turning something into crass, commercial crap," the entire roster of mighty Marvel superheroes has meekly succumbed to the greatest evil of all time: that bottom line-watching, focus group-obsessing, innovation-destroying, suit-wearing, glad-handing, gormless, cultureless, Essence of Big Corporation.

It would have been better if Nick Fury, Thor, Spidey, Wolverine et al. had just died and gone away. Instead, their copyright is now the exclusive property of Disney (along with thousands of other once-proud independent characters - Disney even owns the image of the RCMP). My heroes will be distorted and disgraced, exploited and over-exposed.

Marvel's edge was its edge: its superheroes were unhappy; they were failures; they were plagued by doubt and fear. At their best, the stories and drawings sprang from a deep well of geeky angst, and demonstrated that the strength of independence is sometimes the result of the weakness of loneliness. This wonderful art form was born because the audience was prepubescent and the writers connected with that time of frustrating powerless life on the cusp.

For the last few summer seasons, the cinematic extension of the superhero genre has got more and more interesting. The commercial potential is there for the genre to continue, but what form will it take now? The fear is that Disney will take it down the path of big budget pablum (X-Men, Transformers) vs the innovation of the very best (Watchmen, Iron Man, Hancock).

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Watchmen (Review)

...Not a review, though. Strangely enough I don't have anything much to say except: it's fabulous! All around great entertainment: great music, great characters, great plot. I plan to go back and see it on an IMAX screen as soon as I can.

I had heard that the plot was hard to follow and that you need to have read the graphic novel, but I hadn't read the graphic novel and I had no trouble following it. Also, don'tbe put off by the length: I found it engrossing all the way through.

Just like Hancock, this film got poor reviews. (On Rotten Tomatoes, Hancock got 39%; Watchmen got 64%.) It's hard to understand how two such good movies could get so panned by the press. It may be that critics don't "get" superhero movies: they think they should be shlock, and can't handle complexity. Unless, of course, one of the stars ODs before release.

(If I had guts I'd have written about the social implications of Dr. Manhattan's genitals.)

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The Dark Knight (review)

- no spoilers -

If Christian Bale were to get an Academy award nomination for his portrayal of Batman in The Dark Knight (which is unlikely), he would have to be nominated for a supporting role. That pretty well sums up what's wrong with the movie.

In superhero movies the bad guy almost always steals the show. That's just the genre. The bad guy generally has the best lines and is played by a superior actor. Notable examples are Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Tommy Lee Jones, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina and Liam Neeson. Even in the old Batman TV show the villains were played by an array of great actors.

But even given the typical role of a villain in a superhero movie, in The Dark Knight we see too much of the Joker - and too much of it is fluff. That may be because the actor playing him died and the studio was unwilling to cut his scenes even though he wasn't originally slotted for so much air time. I don't know. Heath Ledger does an okay job, but the core of the movie should be Batman and his relationship with everyone else. Batman gets a bit shunted aside in this one. (Heck, "Batman" isn't even in the title.)

Having said that, there were other things wrong with the movie. I didn't hate it, but I did look at my watch a dozen times and by 90 minutes in (an hour from the end!) I was really, really ready for it to be over.

One thing the director doesn't seem to get is that you shouldn't blow things up just to show off your special effects budget. Satisfying movie destruction can be shocking, compelling, scary, traumatic, redemptive, funny - but it has to provoke some emotion. Probably the world's most satisfying car chase/wreck scene is the one at the end of The Blues Brothers. Dozens and dozens of police cars get smashed. The audience whoops and hollers. That's satisfying. In The Dark Knight many many things get blown up, but I found it all rather ho-hum. In fact, by the end I really didn't care what got blown up or who got killed. I just lost interest.

I wanted to enjoy the movie. I expected to enjoy it. I prefer a well-rounded superhero movie like the Tim Burton Batmans or Ironman, but I can also enjoy a superhero movie that's a bit cheesey or a bit thin. I like the superhero genre in part because they tend to have a dark edge. However, this movie took itself too seriously, and that is the ultimate mood-killer. Its portrayal of Batman tarnished the Batman brand, which is discouraging. In fact, it wasn't even really a superhero movie. It couldn't decide whether it was a summer blockbuster or a serious movie and it ended up just being pretentious and uneven.

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Hancock (review)

Superhero comic book writers were the forerunners to programmer nerds: supersmart, supercreative, outsiders, geeks. Or at least that's how I imagine them. The superheroes they created were a far cry from Archie and Jughead. They were complex characters with flaws to balance their strengths, philosophical quandries, self-reflection.

So it's really no surprise that superhero films are getting so interesting. The Superman movies were pretty run of the mill, but Tim Burton took the genre into new territory with the first two Batman movies. Since then there have been hits and misses, but the good superhero movies keep getting better. And better. And better.

I can't explain the reviews of Hancock. Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles hundreds of print reviews, rated it at 36%. The only thing I can think is that it doesn't follow the usual plot arc we're accustomed to for action films: it zigs and zags in ways that I thought were delightful, but apparently some people don't. Still, how did they miss what a great movie it is? How great the performances are by Will Smith, Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron, all of whom breathe real life into their characters? The one hiccup for me was a little thing with the moon at the end, but even that was sort of endearing.

The movie plays with the idea of superhero as monster - as a Boris Karloff/Frankenstein kind of monster. "I'm the only one of my kind" Hancock wails, as he accidentally leaves destruction in his wake even though he tries to do good. He's a man, not a monster, and so there is room for redemption, but redemption doesn't come through the usual channels: it's redemption as PR campaign, but redemption nonetheless.

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Robert Downey Jr Redefining the Comic Book Movie

When I was a little girl my favorite comic was Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos. Fury was a grandly menacing figure: always scowling or screaming, usually with a cigar butt between his teeth. I'll never forget the exciting episode where I learned what forgery was and that there were people who could detect forged signatures. Now that was exciting super-sleuth technology!


Sergeant Fury turned into Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD (our hero gets a promotion to a spy organization) and I liked that too, but age eventually changed my tastes and by the time I was nine or ten I had switched my allegiance to Thor. Thor was more your typical comic book hero type: an outsider, a wanderer - lonely, disgruntled, searching for meaning. (Plus he had long blond hair and a hat with wings.)

By the time comic books started becoming huge movie blockbusters I was an adult and hadn't read comics in a while, but what really appealed to me in the movies was that outsider thing. Great comic book heroes, I decided, have to have a whole lot of angst, like Batman and Spiderman. I would almost measure the effectiveness of a comic book movie based on the hero's level of angst.

Then today I saw Iron Man, and all that changed. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is the opposite of an angst-ridden teenager. He's a supremely confident 40-something engineer super-genius. His character flaw (if you choose to think of it that way) is that he gets bored and fills the void with drinking and philandering. Other comic book movie heroes are superheroes because some deep trauma has made it impossible for them to be otherwise. Iron Man dons his suit for rational reasons. For me, Tony Stark is a return back to my roots and the kind of hero represented by Nick Fury.

And I like him. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Robert Downey Jr pulling it off. He's a drunken jerk, but he's our hero.

The very last line of the movie is a real velvet hammer - a knockout punch that defines the character and made me, at least, exit the theater thinking only one thing: I can't wait for the next one. And they better bring back Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard and Shaun Toub, too.

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