Like Last Night, this was an independent movie released much earlier in the year but I just never got around to reviewing it until now. Back in the very first weeks of the site’s history, I felt like it was a waste of time to do more than two movie reviews a week as no one would read them. Now I’m clearly much more comfortable writing things that no one will read!
What Works: The movie is about a very regular guy played by Rainn Wilson who loses his gorgeous but drug addicted stripper wife Liv Tyler to a drug dealer played by Kevin Bacon and handles it in the only way he can: by wearing a cheap homemade superhero costume, calling himself “The Crimson Bolt,” and beating the hell out of “criminals” with a wrench. Things also get a bit livelier when Ellen Page forces her way into the action as The Crimson Bolt’s unrequited sidekick.
What Doesn’t Work: The movie isn’t really as fun as it sounds. The lead character is relentlessly depressing and isn’t “cleaning up the streets” so much as just hurting people. BUT the movie gets caught between a more realistic approach to superheroes (an admirable goal that lasts for about five minutes) and a hyper-violent videogame movie that defies all plausibility. By the end, it just feels like a Kick-Ass knockoff, and that movie was pretty derivative itself.
What I Would Have Done Differently: One of these days there will be a superhero based movie that actually liberates itself from the world of comic books. It won’t have the stylized hyper violence or the fantasy sequences or the knowing references to other comic book superheroes or the dorky graphics there for “ironic” purposes that actually just feels like slavish devotion. That movie will be free as a bird from the expectations and genre of superhero films (much as The Dark Knight and the Dr. Manhattan parts of Watchmen got very close to doing). And that movie will be a marvel to behold.