by Nick Schager
[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Marvel's superhero-team extravaganza The Avengers.]
Released before 2002's Spider-Man and the ensuing (and still-ongoing) onslaught of CG superhero spectacles, The Specials is something like Watchmen-lite, with its deconstruction performed not with an incisive scalpel but a feathery sarcastic touch. Unlike screenwriter James Gunn's more recent Super—which bluntly delved into the psychosexual madness underlying masked avengers' vigilantism—his prior likeminded effort is a humorously cheeky affair, focusing on a mundane day in the life of The Specials, the "sixth or seventh greatest superhero team in the world." That ragtag group of do-gooders is led by The Strobe (Thomas Haden Church), a pompous blowhard whose arrogance—epitomized by his fondness for recounting to team members his origin story, in which he likens himself to God—is laced with a melancholy born from the realization that he's woefully low on the superhero ladder. His problems are compounded by the contempt showered on him by wife Ms.
[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Marvel's superhero-team extravaganza The Avengers.]
Released before 2002's Spider-Man and the ensuing (and still-ongoing) onslaught of CG superhero spectacles, The Specials is something like Watchmen-lite, with its deconstruction performed not with an incisive scalpel but a feathery sarcastic touch. Unlike screenwriter James Gunn's more recent Super—which bluntly delved into the psychosexual madness underlying masked avengers' vigilantism—his prior likeminded effort is a humorously cheeky affair, focusing on a mundane day in the life of The Specials, the "sixth or seventh greatest superhero team in the world." That ragtag group of do-gooders is led by The Strobe (Thomas Haden Church), a pompous blowhard whose arrogance—epitomized by his fondness for recounting to team members his origin story, in which he likens himself to God—is laced with a melancholy born from the realization that he's woefully low on the superhero ladder. His problems are compounded by the contempt showered on him by wife Ms.
- 5/3/2012
- GreenCine Daily
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