# Mystery Men (1999)

### reviewed by
Stephen Graham Jones

The trailer didn't lie: Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) has captured Captain Amazing (wholesome Greg Kinnear), leaving a superhero-sized void in the skies of Champion City. Enter Mr Furious, the Bowler, the Shoveler, Blue Raja & Co. (Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, William H. Macy, and Hank Azaria) to fill that void and save the city. All slapstick aside, this is Kinka Usher's Mystery Men, a send-up of all the Supermans and Batmans and Spawns and Phantoms which have been taking themselves too seriously for too long now. Granted, The Mask dealt with the whole superhero shtick in a similarly tongue-in-cheek manner, but it didn't go nearly as far as Mystery Men. Or, it was comic, but its comedy was confined to the scenic level; the backbone of the superhero movie was left intact (i.e., the target audience--children--was conservatively not overshot). Not so with Mystery Men. Mystery Men does to the superhero movie what Rustler's Rhapsody did to the western: reduces it to the level of ridiculousness while still retaining that same mass appeal. Yes, it does still have all the flash and gadgetry of the Batman series, but--and this is important--the standby notions of good and evil have been called into question. And in a particularly clever manner: the hero no longer fights evil just because s/he's good, but because it's good publicity to fight evil. And good publicity translates immediately into corporate sponsorship, endorsement opportunities, star treatment. But it's not easy being a superhero, either. You have to worry about staying in character, sticking to a theme, matching your gloves with your boots, getting the right publicist, and--as in Captain Amazing's case which sets things in motion--you have to worry especially about having an arch-nemesis left to fight. Batman had The Joker, Superman had Lex Luthor, etc. As Mystery Men opens, though, Champion City is pretty much free of arch-villains; Captain Amazing has been a little too amazing for his own good, evidently. This is remedied soon enough, by him, even, which, once it all turns around on him, leaves room for the wannabees to fumble around and save the day. And this wannabee contingent is the one brilliant aspect of the movie, simply because it's so logical: in a world where superheroes wear Pepsi armbands, there will of course be hero-types a few rungs down, longing to wear that armband as well, longing to save the city so as to get a little airtime. But not every wannabee is a hero, either. Some are just grown men wearing tutus. And some, like Mr Invisible, can only be invisible when no one's looking at them. And the villains are nearly as fantastic (disco gangs etc.), if a tad more traditional: they seem to still want to take over the city just because that's what villains do. Which is something of a weakness, in that their motivations are no longer the inverse of the heroes' (commercially-oriented) motivations, which is to say that the good guys and the bad guys no longer counterbalance each other. Even in Rustler's Rhapsody there is at least that balance. It lends a wholeness to the proceedings, a wholeness missing from Mystery Men. It goes deeper, though. While the sub-arch-nemeses are equally as theme-loyal etc as the heroes here, the arch-arch nemesis--Casanova Frankenstein--is, aside from his wonderful name, wholly typical. To return to Rustler's Rhapsody again, in it the villain achieves balance with the hero by being equally eccentric-by hiring a good-guy gunman to be his bad guy. Which is a fitting turnaround. Mystery Men has no such built-in turnaround, but instead relies on the individual comic ability of its cast, which, while significant, doesn't quite make up for careless writing. Too, and not dealt with, at the end of the movie these Mystery Men are in the same predicament Captain Amazing opened with: though they have airtime now, they don't have anything to do with that airtime, as they've defeated the one bad guy around. Not for long is the idea, though, right? Which, in spite of itself, brings Mystery Men full circle, transforms it into yet another comic-book superhero movie, albeit with more laughs than usual. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones

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