Like a bad dream that makes one wonder what bizarre anxieties brought on such misery, writer-director James Gunn's so-called comedy "Super" flings around its dingy shocks with little feel for context, wit or filmmaking skill.
Attempting "Taxi Driver"-style seaminess in superhero-parody guise, it drags us through the psychotic, downward spiral of Frank (Rainn Wilson of "The Office"), a disturbed, loser-ish fry cook. When his beautiful ex-addict wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a smarmy drug dealer (Kevin Bacon), Frank finalizes his break from reality by turning himself into a costumed, wrench-wielding vigilante called the Crimson Bolt, who in action is decidedly more deranged assailant than do-gooder. Adding hanger-on sidekick Boltie (Ellen Page), a flowering sadist, hardly helps.
Condescending and satirically obvious about comic-book obsessives while revving up for a hyper-violent good-versus-evil blowout, Gunn fancies himself a hero-worship provocateur, manipulating our movie-pleasure sensors as he follows moments of mockably unhinged behavior with semi-serious ditherings about Frank's naive rescue fantasies.
But where Gunn's last feature "Slither" was an enjoyably icky, funny riff on schlocky horror tropes, the split-personality "Super" merely repels with half-baked ideas, Wilson's and Page's scorched-earth overacting and atonal bursts of jokey gore. To this "Kapow" and "Bam" world, please add "Bleccch."
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