Mikey At The Movies!: SHORT REVIEW: Superhero Movie

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

SHORT REVIEW: Superhero Movie

Superhero Movie (Rated PG-13)

Running time: 1 hr 25 mins

Cast:

Drake Bell
Christopher McDonald
Leslie Nielsen
Sara Paxton
Kevin Hart

Critical consensus:

*1/2 out of *****

Matt's Take:

C

Mikey @ The Movies Official Rating:

*** out of *****

The premise:

Orphaned high school student Rick Riker is bitten by a radioactive dragonfly, develops super powers (except for the ability to fly), and becomes a hero.

MY REVIEW

Superhero Movie is from the guy (Craig Mazin) who brought us Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. Personally, I preffered those two films to the earlier two Scary Movie films. They sort of dipped back to what the genre started with, back in the early 80's with one of my all-time favorite films, Airplane. Superhero Movie is no Airplane, I want to say that real quick. In fact all these spoof movies have lost all the touch we grew to love with Airplane. These movies no longer bring us any originality. Honestly, it's a dying film breed in it's last breath with such god-awful films as Meet the Spartans and the inevitable crap-fest, Disaster Movie. However, Superhero Movie somehow to me, was kind of funny. Kind of entertaining, kind of enjoyable.

This teeters on a 2 1/2 to 3 star rating for me, because it is by no means a good movie. It's korny, but obviously, that's what it is supposed to be, what do you expect? There were actually a lot of jokes where I found myself genuinely laughing. Meet the Spartans didn't even get a slight chuckle out of me. The thing that seperates the two movies is that Superhero sticks to it's story and the genre it's spoofing (superhero-action pics). It's humor is meant for the movie and its storyline, whereas Spartans just threw in an as many random jokes as they could that had nothing to do with the story (Yeah, they brought back the Yo-Mama jokes). So that's where I give Superhero Movie credit, at least it stays true to it's original genre.

The movie is rated PG-13, barely getting away with it as well. There are numerous sex related jokes involving teens (Nickelodeons Drake Bell) quite a bit of cussing (including the one PG-13 allowed "F" bomb), and an extremely elongated fart joke. A lot of the humor is pretty PG-13 though, but it gets away with a lot. Probably not a film quite appropriate for younger kids. The performances are stupid, but again, meant to be so. Good to see Leslie Nielsen (Airplane, Naked Gun series) still going at it with these movies. This guy was once a dramatic actor. To sum it up though, Superhero Movie is a dumb little comedy that entertains unlike so many spoof movies have done recently. It's just one of those movies that's fun to watch but in a few weeks, you just don't care about it anymore.