Mystery Men

Mystery Men has an immediately appealing cast that includes Greg Kinnear, Geoffrey Rush, Janeane Garofalo, William H. Macy, Ben Stiller and Paul Reubens (well maybe the latter not so much) but unfortunately little else to recommend it.

Kinnear plays Captain Amazing, Champion City’s equivalent of Batman, who has struck a crisis. He’s been so effective at wiping out crime that he has run out of villains to best and his sponsors (his crime-fighting suit is covered in badges like a Grand Prix driver) are walking away. So he comes up with a scheme to free his arch enemy Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) from jail. The plan backfires because Amazing is no match for Frankenstein and soon he is in the latter’s dungeon as Frankenstein prepares to render Champion City to rubble. Neither, however, have counted on a group of would-be superheroes who set about saving the day.  The only problem is, they don’t have any superpowers

Mystery Men tries very hard to be absurdly funny but most of the time, despite its intention to be outrageous, it only manages to be silly being routinely written by Neil Cuthbert adapting a comic book series by Bob Burden. There are some amusing moments but these are exceeded by the film’s misfires. Most of the former come from the more talented comedic actors, Stiller, Macy, Kinnear et. al. but when one of your characters (Ruebens) is a lisping dork with giant pimples who knocks out people with his farts (why did they call him The Spleen and not The Sphincter?) you’re really getting to the bottom of the barrel in the wit department.

Director Kinka Usher making his feature debut (with a background in advertising he apparently did not have a happy time with the film and has not directed another since) bookends proceedings with time-filliing brawling action set piece and generally tries to mask the script’s banality with excessive SFX.  It doesn’t work and if the entire cast deleted this film from their C.V.s no-one would be worse off.

Available from: Shock Entertainment

 

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