Craig Mazin's Superhero Movie benefits from timing and low
expectations. Had it been released 10 years ago, it probably would have been
dismissed as second-rate Zucker-brothers silliness. Then came Scary Movie and the cinematic plague of Epic/Date Movies. Suddenly, thanks to the
Wayans brothers and comedy antichrists Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg,
standards for genre parodies plummeted to such unspeakable lows that Superhero Movie can now be warmly embraced as
second-rate Zucker-brothers silliness. Nobody expects spoofs like this to be
funny or clever, let alone satirical: It's enough if they aren't soul-crushing
or egregiously awful. By those exceedingly lenient standards, Superhero Movie is a rousing success.
It helps that Superhero is a fairly faithful,
coherent parody of Spider-Man, with Drake Bell in the Tobey
Maguire role of a clean-cut teen who develops superpowers after an unfortunate
incident with a dragonfly. Christopher McDonald co-stars as Bell's
arch-nemesis, a wealthy, terminally ill industrialist who must kill someone every
day to stay alive. Leslie Nielsen, Jeffrey Tambor, Marion Ross, and Tracy
Morgan are among the familiar faces popping up in supporting roles, and while a
dude playing Tom Cruise makes a groan-inducing, already-dated appearance, he
boasts a fraction of the screen time afforded to a suicidal, profane parody of
superstar physicist Stephen Hawking, who was doing that crazy robo-voice-box
thing well before T-Pain made it cool.
Superhero's commercials make it look
like a zeitgeist-crazed sequel to Epic Movie. Unsurprisingly, the film's
weakest moments are also its timeliest: It's easy to imagine Mazin calling up
his teenage nephew and pointedly inquiring, "Now the kids are all doing the
Facebook on their YouTube, right? And they do that with the iPhone and the
two-girls-one-cup, right? Putting all that hip, cool stuff in my movie will
really wow the young people, eh?" Superhero spices up its pratfalls and
verbal tomfoolery with stabs at Seltzer/Friedberg lowest-common-denominator
raunchiness, but it generally opts for the more genial, low-key brand of
spoofery practiced by producer David Zucker. It's remarkable how far a few mild
chuckles and an overall air of affability will take a lowbrow comedy these
days. Undiscriminating comedy fans hungering for the High School High of superhero parodies need
look no further.