Joey, Do You Like Movies About Superheroes?

Superheroes are inherently ridiculous. Don't get me wrong; I love superheroes as much as, if not more than, the next guy who wore Spider-Man Underoos as a kid. It's just that the very things that make them attractive -- the blatant power fantasies, the colorful costumes, their sheer iconicity -- lend themselves to piss-taking. There's a rich history of comedy in superhero comics: Harvey Kurtzman's typically grotesque "Superduperman"; Don Simpson's Crumb-by-way-of-Kirby Megaton Man; Ben Edlund's absurd The Tick; the pinned-to-the-wall satire of Dave Sim's Cockroach in Cerebus. For me, the king was Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming's Ambush Bug, as anarchic and head-spinning as Monty Python at their peak. Good times, those.

It's a shame that the movies haven't mined that rich history for some comedy with bite, and it's sad that the closest they've come is the anemic Mystery Men. (If you count TV, however, The Venture Brothers is probably the pinnacle.) Producer/writer/director Craig Mazin has given it a go twice. He directed The Specials, a low-budget comedy about a superhero team on their day off (I haven't seen it) and his second effort, Superhero Movie, aims to do for the recent explosion of Marvel and DC movies what Airplane! did for the 70s airplane disaster movie and Hot Shots! did for Top Gun.

In other words, it's a spoof movie, and boy, this is the worst possible time to make a spoof movie. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, excreters of Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie, among others, have by all accounts pretty much degraded the form beyond hope. (I'll admit, I've never seen one of their movies, but judging from the trailers, they appear to be 100% joke-free, which isn't quite how I like my comedy.) Mazin, however, is an acolyte of David Zucker, of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team that gave us those classic 80s spoofs -- Airplane! is probably the most artistically successful, but my favorite was the Police Squad! TV show. It's worth noting that Mazin originally titled his movie Superhero!, but it was changed -- by the studio, I imagine -- to keep current with the recent crop of spoofs. It's easy to see why Mazin wanted that original title -- Superhero Movie is a beat-for-beat parody of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, and ZAZ, in their heyday, targeted one narrowly-defined genre, or even just a specific film.

Sadly, though, the movie doesn't deserve the exclamation mark. It's not terrible, mind you -- I chuckled a few times, and there's an early moment where the phrase "healthy cough-blood" got a guffaw out of me -- but it's uninspired. There's an over-reliance on slapstick -- not the kind of carefully built-up slapstick, that slowly escalates into a tidal wave of destruction and embarrassment, but the kind where, in lieu of an actual joke, someone just gets conked on the head. This is par for the course ever since the Scary Movie series brought the spoof movie back into vogue (Mazin co-wrote and David Zucker directed installments 3 & 4), but I guess I naively expected Mazin to really honor his mentors. But there doesn't seem to be a personal take on the material -- Mazin is so content to follow Spider-Man like a karaoke tune that every set-up can be seen a mile away, and the payoff is hardly ever worth it. The ZAZ movies, despite the seeming randomness, had a definite worldview -- there's a chilliness to them, the characters are so deadpan and absurd, it's like we're watching it from the viewpoint of an alien. As Charlie Chaplin said, comedy is in the long shot.

I sincerely doubt anyone needed me to tell them that Superhero Movie isn't worth their time -- not all your suspicions are true, but yeah, most of them are. It's just that comedy and superheroes are such a great combination, yet while superhero movies get better and better, film comedy languishes. Spoofs are dead. We need not just better writers, but actual comedic geniuses to tackle the comic books. We need Ricky Gervais's Booster Gold and Christopher Guest's Justice League International. We need Edgar Wright doing Ant-Man. (Oh wait, that one's actually happening.) Dammit, we need Sacha Baron Cohen as Irwin Schwab, the Ambush Bug. Only then can we get the ruthless, hilarious ridicule we deserve.