By the way, though it's inappropriate to get into it here, "Tekno Comix," a company that no longer exists but was owned by "Big Entertainment," was the worst comic book company in the world. They produced horrid comic books, and they also had retail comic book stores in many different malls. I was the Assistant Manager of the one in the Miami International Mall. Man, those guys were so... corporate! They had no clue how comic book geeks think, and had no clue how to make comic book geeks happy, and that's why you won't be seeing anymore of their booths in your local mall. Ugh, it was such a pathetic, poorly-run organization. Cold-hearted, too. A few months after I left so that I could go to Full Sail, bigwigs from the corporate office showed up at the booth I used to work at. They showed up with the new store manager, and told the old store manager that he was fired... right there... just like that. Evil corporate crap. Like "OCP" in "RoboCop." Anyway, as I said, it would be inappropriate to get into it here. :-)
Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a movie review, right? Well, it's KINDA related. "Mystery Men" is based on an obscure comic book story from Dark Horse Comics, and it's different from the typical superhero story. It's definitely a satire. Not as witty as the "Justice League America" comic book series that I mentioned earlier, but it's still pretty good. By the way, thanks to my buddy AJ, I got to see a bootleg copy of "Justice League America," the TV-Movie that was to be the pilot for a possible TV series. Man, was it bad. WOW! It was so bad, it was laughable! And it wasn't true to the comic book series at all. Anyway, yeah, I liked "Mystery Men" a lot.
I really took to the cast, which included Ben Stiller as "Mr. Furious," William H. Macy as "The Shoveler," Kel Mitchell as "The Invisible Boy," Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens as "The Spleen," Hank Azaria as "The Blue Raja," Wes Studi as "The Sphinx," and Janeane Garofalo as "The Bowler." They were all really good, but Janeane Garofalo was definitely my favorite. As for the others, Greg Kinnear was okay as "Captain Amazing," Geoffrey Rush was perfect as "Casanova Frankenstein," and Tom Waits (the eccentric musician was "Renfield" in Francis Ford Coppola's version of "Bram Stoker's Dracula") was great as "Dr. Heller," the mad scientist guy with a strange fetish. Finally, the beautiful Claire Forlani (Brad Pitt's girl in "Meet Joe Black") was... beautiful as "Monica," the groovy-looking waitress. Oh, and there are lotsa obscure cameos to keep your eyes opened for.
"Mystery Men" was written by Neil Cuthbert, who wrote "Hocus Pocus," which I never saw. He has a dark, quirkiness to his writing, and he would be the perfect choice to write a movie directed by Tim Burton. I like his style, and I love the dialogue, though I would hafta assume that quite a bit of the dialogue used in the movie was ad-libbed. Also, as the great film analyst Joe Bob Briggs likes to say, "there's no plot to get in the way of the story." The director was Kinka Usher, and this is his debut feature film as a director. Still, he's directed lotsa well-known commercials, most notably, the "yo quiero Taco Bell" commercials with that chihuahua. He did wonderful work here, the movie has astonishing visuals. Maybe he needs to ease up with the extreme close-ups, though.
I really liked "Mystery Men," but there was something about it that left me a tiny bit dissatisfied, but I don't know what it is. Could it be the crazy thing that happens that's completely unexpected and illogical, and seemingly done purely for laughs? Maybe it's that, because as soon as it's done, the heroes can't really completely save the day. Or maybe it's just that as good as Geoffrey Rush is, there was nothing all that interesting about his supervillain character. But it was cool to see Lena Olin as his sexy sidekick.
Despite it's
flaws, I liked this movie a lot. Still, it's not for the masses. It's for
people who love comic books. The average "cool" person wouldn't get it,
and so what? I'd rather believe that this movie was made just for the comic
book geeks anyway.