Trailer
“That makes no sense. Lance wears glasses, Captain Amazing doesn’t. If took them off how would he see?!”
Another one of the far and few superhero comedies makes an appearance in the 1999 Mystery Men which is supposedly based off a Dark Horse comic called Flaming Carrot Comics….whatever the hell that is. Though it was a flop, the film is not completely deserving of its box office numbers.
Mystery Men stars a wide range of comedic actors (including Ben Stiller, Willaim H. Macy, Geoffrey Rush, exc.) and though it doesn’t fully utilize all of them, it helps in the funny department, which is what the film needed when considering how blatantly ridiculous and—at times—downright obnoxious it could be.
The movie opens with Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller) and his two partners The Shoveler (Macy) and Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) failing to stop a robbery at a retirement center. They are shown up by Champion Cities greatest superhero Captain Amazing. Unfortunately Captain Amazing is a little too good at his job and ends up defeating all the supervillains in the city. With no one left to fight his sponsors start to pull their labels off of his costume and he loses money. In an attempt to regain his lost funding Captain Amazing deliberately sets free his arch nemesis Casanova Frankenstein.
Amazing’s little plan backfires though and he ends up Casanova’s prisoner and that leaves it up to Mr. Furious and his gang to recruit new members in an attempt to save him.
On the surface the concept of the movie is rock solid, where the ludicrous portion comes in is the depiction of the characters as Superhero wannabe’s. Taking the clichés of the sub-genre and intensifying them to the extreme. In this way the film falls more into the realm of parody than The Mask ever did. Where the Mask told it’s own story as a comedy, Mystery Men is very derivative in the attempts to make fun of the multiple aspects of superhero films.
The film has a wide array of characters and they are all played up for laughs. Ben Stiller’s character is really the only one that has some serious moments in there and most of those fall flat anyways. The supporting characters are fun and Rush gives a great performance (as usual) into the main villain of Casanova whose entire plan is to destroy the city for the fun of it. Rush manages to be both funny and somewhat threatening in the roll, which is hard to do. Especially when his henchmen are Disco Fever mochomen who are only working under the promise of Disco returning to popularity.
But when it comes down to it, what is really important for a comedy is not so much the plot or characters, but is it funny? Unlike the Mask, which played upon bombast action of cartoons, Mystery Men only has parody and the cleverness of the jokes to go off of, so the audience might be less forgiving of it. Mystery Men has very slapstick styled comedy in it with verbal play on words and puns which can make for some very quotable lines. It’s done well at times but if you don’t find that kind of stuff funny then steer well and clear of this. Only about two thirds of the jokes really hit, and through I enjoyed the comedy portion it is not for everyone.
The main problem with the film is that it relies so heavily on the comedy that there really isn’t much else there to like if that style does not suite you. The plot is nothing special and the characters not all that memorable. However fans of this type of comedy will enjoy the hell out of it.
FINAL RATING: 5/10- (50%)
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