BEFORE: Sarah Baker carries over from "The Last Word". She had a very small role as a hairdresser in "The Last Word", and I don't think she's got a major role in this one, either, but that's OK. Movies are filled with character actors and bit players, for my purposes this link is just as good as any other, because it gets me to this film, which I'm curious about, and tomorrow's film, which has been on the books for a while now, and I'm even MORE curious about.
THE PLOT: In a world where super-villains are commonplace, two estranged childhood best friends reunite after one devises a treatment that gives them powers to protect their city.
AFTER: Maybe it's the fact that I'm waiting to hear about my work schedule at this new job, but all I can think about is that I've got only a few more days until I might be too busy to watch a movie a day, and THIS is how I've chosen to spend my time? What a waste...
There have been other comedies that have riffed on the superhero genre, like "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" or "Hancock" or even "Deadpool", and that last one was very successful. But you can't just make a superhero film into a comedy, it has to be handled a certain way, and it feels like the people who made this film didn't really think too much about it, they just wanted to jump on the comic book bandwagon, just because the Avengers and other MCU films brought in so much cash.
It comes down to tone, and whether the storyline is believable at all. Sorry to say that the tone here isn't great, nothing feels very FUNNY and mostly, it seems like all involved are just going through the motions. I mean, cosmic rays turning a small portion of Earthlings into super-powered people is semi-believable, but that happening ONLY to bad people and creating ONLY super-villains is not. Why didn't the cosmic radiation create an equal number of villains AND heroes, wouldn't that make more sense? Why did the powers only go to people with evil intent, that seems a little imbalanced, you'd think radiation would be impartial and wouldn't take that into consideration.
Instead, one female scientist has to INVENT super-powers for good people, and this is apparently what her parents were working on when they were killed by "Miscreants" - that's the word for super-villain in this universe. But then even that process is all wonky, like her best friend from grade school accidentally gets the super-strength injections that she was going to give herself. OK, a few things - first, there's no safeguards in the lab to ensure that only the correct person gets the injections? Why on earth would they automate a process that is not only dangerous, but clearly meant for ONE individual person and NOBODY else? That's just bad lab procedure right there. Why introduce the possibility AT ALL of a random person getting the shots, given all the side-effects and untested results that could come with them? What if the WRONG person got these super-strength injections, wouldn't that be terrible and counter-productive?
Emily, the scientist, then has to settle for the second-rate power, which is invisibility - and this is given to her not via injections, but in convenient pill form. This is actually one of the film's better gags, that one subject has to endure dozens of painful shots, and the other just has to swallow a few pills. OK, I'll allow this one because it's funny. But the rest of the process just leads to more and more questions - why these two powers to these two people, and nobody else? What sort of scientist didn't keep track of her breakthrough formula, so that once it got injected into the wrong person, they couldn't re-create the first dose again to give it to somebody else? That's just stupid - with the COVID-19 vaccine, every single step probably had to be documented during its creation, so if there was some kind of setback, they wouldn't have to start over from scratch. Did the scientist forget to keep proper notes or something? This is a huge NITPICK POINT, as it goes against all the rules of scientific theory and proper procedures.
Then we've got the villain with crab-like claws instead of arms - am I supposed to take this seriously, or is this just another gag that isn't as funny as somebody thought it would be? How is this even a super-power, it just seems like a big inconvenience that he doesn't have human hands any more. Can he DO anything special with the crab claws? It doesn't seem like it, so how is that considered a super-power? It's the opposite, like a terrible-power, so I don't get it. Maybe if he had a few extra arms or legs, like crabs do. Maybe if he could run really fast, even sideways, like crabs do. But he can't, he just has useless crab claws, so what's the point? OK, so maybe not every super-villain gets cool laser-beam generating powers, but even still...
On top of all that, the super-villains got their powers in 1983, but it takes humanity until 2024 to come up with a way to fight back? Really? That's 41 years of letting the villains run the show, and they're not even a majority of people. 41 years where regular humans didn't band together to fight back? To not find some kind of military, legislative or even nuclear solution to fight back against evil people? That just doesn't sound like the humanity I know - eventually the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, and maybe the scientific solution of giving powers to GOOD people wouldn't even have been necessary if all the regular people could have just gotten their act together. Again, I don't get it.
I guess you can make a case for this being a progressive film because the main hero characters are two, umm, plus-sized women. That's all well and good, I've got no problem with that, but the film still has to be FUNNY, if that's the way you're going to go with it. The comic books do tend to portray a bunch of unrealistic body types, for both men and women. It's funny, they're all about having more diverse characters like more Asian, Hispanic and Muslim characters, and certainly there's been a push in comic books for more LGBTQ+ characters, but still, it's mostly "no fatties". I get that they want to encourage kids to be more active and in shape, but they kind of take that to the extreme, with all the muscles, right? Marvel tried to have a more body-positive character once with Big Bertha, one of the Great Lakes Avengers - it's tough to tell whether that entire comic title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, though, or Marvel's parody of their own books. Bertha was an enormously overweight woman who was, by nature of being obese, practically invulnerable, able to squash all the villains and flatten injustice, I guess. But she could change her form and by day she was a very thin fashion model, which sent out exactly the wrong message to impressionable young girls. Umm, nice try?
For God's sake, please don't let them make a sequel to this nonsense, which gives superhero films a bad name. Look, I know that Marvel's been a little slow in getting movies released over the last year, but "Black Widow" is on the way (as is "Venom 2" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home". And I know that "Wonder Woman 1984" was a big disappointment, but last year I watched "Birds of Prey" and "Shazam!" and I still have high hopes for the next "Suicide Squad" film. During the down-time from the Big Two, this year I've watched "The Old Guard" and "Project Power", which were both fine superhero films - this one, not so much.
Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Octavia Spencer (last heard in "Dolittle"), Jason Bateman (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Pom Klementieff (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Melissa Leo (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Taylor Mosby, Marcella Lowery, Melissa Ponzio, Ben Falcone (last seen in "CHIPS"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Warrior"), Tyrel Jackson Williams, David Storrs (last seen in "The Boss"), Vivian Falcone (ditto), Brendan Jennings, Jackson Dippel, Nate Hitpas, Mia Kaplan, Bria Danielle Singleton, Tai Leshaun, Trevor Larcom,
RATING: 3 out of 10 pieces of raw chicken
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