Super

Directed by James Gunn

(Not Rated)

**

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This twisted superhero story occupies an interesting “no-man’s land between indie quirk and raw exploitation,” said Scott Tobias in the A.V. Club. In James Gunn’s uneven black comedy, Rainn Wilson plays a sad-sack cook who reinvents himself as a costumed crime fighter after his stripper wife leaves him. The superhero genre has been worked over time and again, of course, but Super stands out for its brash use of “horrific real-world violence”: Wilson’s alter ego doesn’t just fight crime; he clocks wrongdoers with a pipe wrench. When he joins forces with a strangely sexually aggressive sidekick (Ellen Page), things get even more “sick and subversive,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. The idea is that superhero fantasies are fueled by a “pathetic need for attention,” and this film is determined to “take us to the dark side of the power trip.” Unfortunately, Gunn can’t stick to a style or mood long enough to see his vision through, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Ambitious in an unreadable way, Super ends up being “occasionally brilliant, sometimes awful, and terribly confusing overall.”