Super

★★★

(2012)

Sure, Matthew Vaughn’s glossy and fun Kick Ass got there first but there’s something seriously twisted and blackly funny about most of James Gunn’s Super. It’s wildly uneven, hideously gory and is generally all over the road, but with dour faced and bodied Rainn Willson donning a ludicrous superhero vigilante persona as Frank it has enough charm to not always stand tall but alone enough to make this something entirely different.

When his recovering drug addict wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) is stolen from under his nose and turned back on to her old ways by drug boss Jaques (Kevin Bacon) its up to Frank to start cracking people on the head with a wrench and standing up to crime. Garnering the help of comic book fanatic Libby (Ellen Page) the pair work their way up to the top avoiding the law and mostly all out comedy too in favour of black uncomfortable gags where often something softer may have hit the mark with more crackle.

That said though there are some genuinely funny moments and it’s definitely hands down owner of one the for the strangest tones of this ever growing sub genre of films, sometimes jarringly so. Page is miscast and for a while I mistook Liv Tyler for Steve Tyler, Kevin Bacon hams it right up and there’s not a lot of room for character when Gunn seems intent on pulling you very quickly through this strange soup of a film. There is enough there to make Super well worth an odd and original if not always pitch perfect night at the cinema.