 Mystery Men (1999) It's all of these things in various places. The film it probably most compares to is Batman Returns, with a little darkness for "edge" but a decent cheese factor for "irony." I didn't love nor hate this film, and while "like" is too strong, "dislike" is even less accurate. I mostly enjoyed it. When I think about it in retrospect there are many things I like about it. But it wasn't really funny, per se, nor spectacular. It was a bit of a misfire would-be blockbuster that couldn't decide if it wanted to be a parody or a flat-out "big movie." The story, adapted from a graphic novel, concerns a rag-tag bunch of third-tier superheroes who band together to defeat the dreaded lunatic criminal Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush), who has taken ultimate good-guy Captain Amazing (I think I got that wrong, but I'm writing this three weeks after the fact and immediately after emerging from an insulin coma) (Greg Kinnear) hostage. Each character has a unique but strange superpower, and the plot centers around whether they will be able to pull it all together and have a genuine victory over evil. The cast is awesome, especially William H. Macy as The Shoveler and Janeane Garofalo as The Bowler—she steals pretty much every scene she's in and was the film's greatest asset. Ben Stiller is good as Mr. Furious, whose rage and unfocused wit really don't amount to superpowers at all—slowly I come to be able to admit when I enjoy a Ben Stiller performance. Goeffrey Rush is fantastic and obligatorily over- the-top as the supervillain, whose assembled throng of flunkies includes a gang of disco-loving thugs as well as a group of idiotic frat boys (one of the best frat boy jokes I've ever seen in a movie). Paul Reubens is good as The Spleen, though the character is so unpleasant it's hard to tell just how good he is. Hank Azaria is the Blue Raja, whose affected British accent and faux colonialist spirit are hilarious and actually touching – he is an amazing performer who is almost always underutilized, and since I'm on the topic of Hank Azaria let me cast my vote for him to play Harvey Milk if they ever end up making a film biopic of his life. Kel Mitchell of Good Burger fame is an Invisible Boy who can only be invisible when people aren't looking, and he was immensely likable, thankfully dispensing with the stoner shtick we know and love. Don't get me wrong, Good Burger is certainly one of the all-time greatest films ever made, but the shtick wears thin, undoubtedly. Greg Kinnear is good in his small role as an overextended Superman type, and he actually gets killed off, which I thought was awesome. Tom Waits turns in an amusing performance as a humane weapons inventor, and rounding out the cast was Eddie Deezen as Captain Karate. Actually, Eddie Deezen was not in this movie at all, but I wish he had been. That guy always cracks me up. There's a whole lot of unevenness to the film, and the humor is really hard to peg—I don't think I laughed out loud at anything, and many of the jokes weren't even clever, but there was nothing I thought was stupid. Even the disco jokes were played off pretty well—it seemed genuine rather than "Ha ha, disco is funny." The characters were played with integrity rather than showiness, and aside from a couple of utterly unnecessary subplots (an entire subplot involving a waitress Ben Stiller hits on seems even more glaringly forced as it becomes more involved with the central plot) the film is quite enjoyable. It's not stellar, and even the comics crowd were probably left thinking "Oh, it was pretty good." I should have known something was not quite right, because the movie had considerable hype before it was released, and then I didn't hear one thing, good or bad, about it afterward. I think the only people who love Mystery Men are the same people who keep insisting that Shakes the Clown is a neglected cult classic. Janeane Garofalo gets in a gratuitous ad-lib at the end, when the super friends are being interviewed by the news media, about how people should support independent film. It's one of many contradictions inherent in this film that it's a big- budget extravaganza with an indie spirit—not really succeeding at being either. But it hardly fails, in fact I'd see it again, though perhaps only accompanied by alcohol. The problem is, the filmmakers don't seem to have decided what they wanted it to be, and it comes off that way—undefined. But if for nothing else than the performances, Mystery Men is worth a look. Perhaps I should go against all my instincts and hold a Ben Stiller film festival one day. I have a feeling that deep down I actually like him, but I'm just too jealous to admit it. Well what do you expect, my name is Ren Riller.
Review by Ren Riller |