The "do-it-yourself superhero" sub-genre has gained a fair amount of popularity in recent years as a way to deconstruct and subvert expectations from mainstream superhero movies. If there's a danger with these stories, it's the possibility to become too rooted in the mundane and lose the sense of over-the-top fun that makes superhero movies watchable in the first place.
That's what seems to have happened with Super. Like most DIY superhero films, it has a pretty bleak world-view and is punctuated with bursts of extreme graphic violence, though the inherent black comedy aspect is never really that funny. Rainn Wilson's main character is humorless and clearly mentally unstable, and Ellen Page's foul-mouthed sidekick is a shrill, whiny sociopath with a dash of sexual predator thrown in for good measure.
God, I hated her character.
Super is... odd, to say the least. There's nothing glamorous about this movie (even Liv Tyler, arguably the most attractive person in the film--though your mileage may vary on that--is drug-addict-chic most of the time), but that seems to be the point. Even the title is filled with hipster-worthy irony (and let's be honest, hipsters make up a good eighty percent of the viewer demographic for any film that isn't given wide release), because there's nothing "super" about anyone in the movie--least of all the main characters. The whole world of the film is mundane (or at least as mundane as you can get when you're dealing with people who dress up in home-made superhero costumes). To be blunt, I didn't really like Super--but I'm pretty sure most of the things which I disliked were done intentionally. It's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch. It's supposed to be the antithesis of most modern superhero movies, with witty bombastic escapism replaced by blood, futility, and grit.
This presents something of a reviewer's dilemma. If the whole movie is designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, is it really a bad thing when it achieves its desired result so spectacularly?
I had a similar problem when I read The Great Gatsby: I found Fitzgerald's prose to be practically orgasmic, but I hated all the characters because they were all horrifically vain, shallow human beings (yes, even the narrator). To this day, I still can't decide whether or not I actually liked the book. That being said, however, The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece of American literature and Super is a mid-budget indie which will probably fade into relative obscurity within a few months, so there's really no comparison. When you get right down to it, though, Gatsby is famous because it's exceptionally well-written, and there's nothing particularly exceptional about Super. I can enjoy movies that make you feel dead on the inside if they have beautiful cinematography and/or excellent scripts (e.g. Pan's Labyrinth and In Bruges, two of my favorite films of all time), but nothing about Super stands out enough to really excite me.
I suppose the problem with Super wasn't the fact that it made me uncomfortable so much as the fact that it never made me feel anything else. My main response to the movie can be summed up with a mildly perplexed, generally turned-off "....huh." I didn't really care about any of the characters, the violence tended toward the pointlessly gory, and it wasn't as darkly amusing as I had hoped. (PROTIP: Comedic sociopathy isn't funny unless it's so over-the-top that the only possible response is laughter. PROTIP #2: If the audience doesn't like said comedic sociopath, it defeats the entire purpose of having one to begin with. In other words, don't make her a shrill, obnoxious harpy.)
Of course, this isn't to say that the movie has no redeeming characteristics. There are a number of much-needed subversions of superhero/action movie tropes (the most notable being "Why doesn't anyone wearing a bulletproof vest ever get shot in the head?") and some clever ideas, but I don't feel like they're ever fully developed. It's established early-on that Rainn Wilson's character suffers from occasional hallucinations (sometimes involving divine tentacle rape), and I feel like the movie could have made more of the whole "he thinks the bad guys are actually demons" thing, but it only appears once or twice for the rest of the movie. It feels like a missed opportunity, especially given that his first inspiration to become a costumed vigilante comes from a Bible-themed TV superhero named the Holy Avenger (played with typical charm by Nathan Fillion). Similarly, the climactic action sequence features some Adam-West-ish BLAMs and POWs popping up onscreen, but the gimmick appears so suddenly and disappears so soon after that it really only made me scratch my head and wonder what the fuck the point was. If the comic book effects had been used through most of the movie (say, as a symptom of the main character's previously established hallucinations) then it could have come across as a fun stylistic choice (much like Scott Pilgrim's video game bits) instead of being jarring.
Long story short: if you're looking for a fun DIY superhero movie, skip Super and (re)watch Kick-Ass. It's nowhere near perfect (the title character's story is by far the least interesting part of the movie), but it does have Nicolas Cage doing his best Adam West impression while he brutally murders mafia goons and shoots his 12-year-old daughter in the chest. Now that's comedic sociopathy I can believe in.
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