10 Best Superhero Movies
Aug 10 '02
The Bottom Line I'm a lover of well-done superhero adventures, but I'm also a prude. These movies have been selected on that basis.
I'm a prude. And it's particularly visible when I evaluate superhero movies. I expect them to set certain standards for their impressionable young viewers. Having grown up with a fascination for superhero comic books whenever I could get them, resulting in a collection that has gotten ridiculously large in these last few years, I regard myself as something of an expert on them and their behavior patterns and obligations. With that in mind, I have a few basic rules for deciding if a superhero movie can even be considered as one of the "best" or not.
1. If a superhero has extramarital/premarital sex in the film, even if we don't actually see the torrid scene set in a bed but only can reasonably deduce that it's been happening from what we do see and hear, it doesn't qualify as "one of the best." Sad to say, this eliminates Superman 2, Superman 3, Batman, the 90-minute pilot for the short-lived TV show The Flash, X-Men, and arguably Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (though it's so understated that you could plausibly argue it may not have happened). All of those films would otherwise certainly have been in the running as I prepared a list of candidates. I admit that in the case of Superman 3 he had been poisoned/drugged/whatever by a bad piece of synthetic kryptonite and thus wasn't fully responsible for his own actions at the time, but it's still enough to cross that film off my list of "best" ones.
2. If it's rated R, it's outside the envelope. So let's say goodbye to The Punisher, Black Scorpion, Darkman, Blade . . .
3. If I'm embarrassed to admit I even watched it, it's a lost cause. Inspector Gadget. Todd McFarlane's Spawn. The made-for-television Captain America movie of 1979. To some extent, Batman 4, though I rewatched it several months ago and decided it did have some good points. The bad points still galled, however, and they were the ones I remembered most vividly from my only previous experience with it, in the theatre when it was a new release.
4. Just being based on a "pulp hero" (or being a modern creation in that vein) doesn't make you a superhero. A superhero should make a name for himself, preferably while wearing a mask and trying to maintain a secret identity, and preferably without making any money for his trouble. Pulp-hero-style movies include Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (the TV pilot), the Conan the Barbarian films (I would eliminate them even if they weren't rated R), Kull the Conqueror, Doc Savage . . . The Man of Bronze, The Saint (not that his movie in the 90s had much in common with Leslie Charteris's original conception), all the Tarzan movies, and of course The Phantom (I'm sorry, but a costumed figure whom nobody has ever heard of when you get much more than ten miles away from his home in the jungle just doesn't work for me as a real superhero, even though I thought it was a pretty good adventure film and would have bought a ticket to the sequel).
5. It's got to be a single story at least 60 minutes long. A video tape collecting a couple of Batman's episodes from his half-hour cartoon show (which means the total tape is still only about 45 minutes long) just doesn't cut it as a "movie" in my book. Likewise, a single episode from an hour-long show (which would mean I got less than 50 minutes of actual story) wouldn't qualify as a great superhero movie in my book either.
6. If the major characterization point is that the hero kills lots and lots of people in the name of law and order with his super-weapons and stuff, he doesn't qualify. Robocop and Judge Dredd fall into this category.
As you can see, once I had set up these filters, the main problem was to even fill up 10 spaces on the short list. In fact, I wasn't sure I could do so when I was first sorting out my ideas (back around last December). Accordingly, I decided to wait several months for the Spider-Man film and see if it could help bring me up to 10. Indeed it did, and here are the finalists! (In alphabetical order - I won't even try to grade them from "best" to "tenth best.")
01. Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
02. Batman Forever (Batman #3)
03. Batman Returns (Batman #2)
04. The Mask
05. The Mask of Zorro
06. Mystery Men
07. The Rocketeer
08. The Shadow
09. Spider-Man
10. Superman
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. The only animated feature on my list. The Batman Beyond cartoon series on TV is set decades in the future, when Bruce Wayne is finally retired due to his aging heart, and a spunky teenager has taken over the role. One advantage here from the storytelling perspective is that the writers can dust off old reliable Batman characters and reveal what their final fates were. (Without, of course, having the ongoing comics set in the modern day feel any need to respect these decisions in one possible future.) In this feature-length film, the Joker is unquestionably dead as of many years ago. The circumstances were so traumatic that Robin found it necessary to retire from the superhero business after it all ended. But now it seems that the Joker, or someone who has both his style and I believe his voiceprint, has come back, still looking fit and fine. The new "Batman" has his work cut out for him trying to get the old-timers to open up to him about what really happened to the Joker all those years ago, because he correctly suspects that the answer might provide some clues to what is going on right now.
Batman Forever. This one does a capable job of introducing Robin. Two-Face is former D.A. Harvey Dent, who was played by a black man earlier (Billy Dee Williams, in the first Batman), but now the non-ruined side of his face looks a heck of a lot like Tommy Lee Jones for some reason. Before seeing this film, I had actually thought it would be nice to see Mr. Williams get a larger role in a later Batman film, based on his having been established as Harvey Dent (which I assumed to be deliberately laying the groundwork for his later transformation). Now I can't help wondering if the thinking went like this: "We need at least one African-American with a bit of dialogue in the first Batman movie. So we'll take D.A. Harvey Dent from the comics and turn him into an African-American." Several years later: "Okay, we're going to use Two-Face in the third Batman movie. But if we cast him as an African-American, people will probably say there's something racist about our taking a nutcase who's always been white in the comics and making him a dark-skinned nutcase instead. We better find a middle-aged white man we can use instead. What's Tommy Lee Jones doing these days?" Or maybe they just figured Jones was a bigger box office draw than Williams, or maybe Williams was offered the job and turned it down (though I somehow doubt it).
Anyway, moving away from wild speculation and on to facts, Two-Face gets some good material in the early scenes of the movie, then is largely upstaged by the very loud Jim Carrey after the two of them team up.
We do fall into the "James Bond Revolving Door of Romance" syndrome again, however. The girlfriend from one film discreetly vanishes into thin air during the gap before the next one to save our hero the trouble of having to make a (shudder) lasting commitment! But it would never do to see a hero doing something so crass as the masculine equivalent of the "Good Night and Thank You" song in Evita, wherein the ruthlessly ambitious Evita shoos one lover after another out of her life as soon as she no longer needs anything they can do for her . . . hence the ladies just seem to quietly fade in and out of the hero's life on their own.
In this case, Dr. Chase Meridian seems to really connect with Batman in this movie, then promptly disappears in the gap before the next one, as did Vicki Vale and Selina Kyle before her. Batman's pheromones apparently attract beautiful blond women just long enough for him to start feeling serious about them before they mysteriously disappear to make room for the next girlfriend - except that Chase had misjudged the situation when she pulled her disappearing act, because Batman never actually got a new girlfriend in the fourth movie. She could have stuck around for that one without being in the way, and I wish she had. She could have psychoanalyzed Mr. Freeze or something.
On the plus side, she first has a silly infatuation with the grim Batman, but grows out of it as she comes to appreciate the more human side of Bruce Wayne. I loved the scene where Chase breaks the news to Batman that she's found someone else. I thought he took this tragic discovery extremely well, in a fashion that ought to be a role model for all men who find themselves in the same stressful situation. (Granted, the fact that he knew he was also the "someone else" may have had a wee bit to do with his remarkable composure, if you want to split hairs.)
Batman Returns. In a pleasant contrast to the Vicki Vale role in the first film, this one concentrates on building chemistry between Batman and the shamelessly flirtatious Catwoman (and their more restrained secret identities, in what is initially a parallel but separate budding romance) rather than simply building up to having them hop in bed together. Batman's home town looks as dark and gloomy as ever (why would anyone want to live there if all those brooding shadowy buildings and dark alleys and such are all you ever see, day after day?), the Penguin is nicely psychotic, and there's the nasty dig at a filthy rich CEO of a major corporation as being just as dangerous a villain as anyone else in the story (an idea which is coming back into fashion these days, with all these scandals about false accounting and other dirty tricks, but heck, what's a few billion dollars more or less among friends?).
The Mask. I laughed and laughed and laughed. 'Nuff said!
What's that? You don't think that was quite enough? Okay, let me put it this way. Uninhibited. Jim Carrey's character finds that the mask gives him weird powers and also lets loose the wild and crazy side of his personality. Let's face it: we've all had fantasies about the things we would do with such power, and our fantasies don't necessarily focus on noble, altruistic actions. In Jim Carrey's case, he wants the money to go out for a wild night on the town, so he robs a bank along the way. (Great scene where he wakes up as himself the next morning and is horrified to find all that cash spilling out of his closet just as the police come knocking on the door to ask him a few questions about a disturbance last night.) Sheer escapism - we know we can't get away with doing whatever we want, but we like to think that if we did, we'd do it with the quirky sense of humor and general flamboyance that Carrey-as-the-Mask throws at us. (What can I say? I liked his Cuban Pete musical number!) On the other hand, after we got all the childishness out of our systems, we might be willing to fight crime and so forth in time of need.
(A note: Carrey's dog ended up looking more responsible and unselfish than his master when faced with temptation, which will come as no great surprise to all you dog lovers out there.)
The Mask of Zorro. Superheroes seldom age in the comic books. Teenagers (the Amazing Spider-Man, the X-Men, the first Robin) sometimes grow up to be twentysomethings, but then they freeze. Meanwhile, those who started out as adults (Superman, Batman, Captain America) almost never develop gray hairs or bald spots or other signs of age that would suggest they have gotten any further along in life than thirtysomething. But in this movie, set safely in the early 19th Century where it's a bit easier to admit that the original hero must have gotten older eventually, since he doesn't live in the present to begin with, we see the changing of the guard. The original Zorro has actually gone gray during the years he spent in prison, but elects to train a younger man to revive the legend and maintain the public image of a larger-than-life man who will always be there when the common people really need him. That's the sensible way to keep the legend alive without having the man behind the mask eventually drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a fight because he didn't know when to quit.
I select this one as a superhero movie because Anthony Hopkins as Zorro seemed to be more interested in providing a symbol of inspiration for others, and less interested in killing people by the dozen than you might expect in an action movie set in the Old West. As I recall, the heroes do very little killing (if any?) until the final battle, and that was justified by the desperate need to rescue hundreds of slave laborers before they were all slaughtered by the villain to cover his own tracks. This one really struck me as being a story about human beings (who happened to see a lot of action), rather than a story about bloodshed as the principal means of character development.
Mystery Men. I laughed at this one too. One scene from near the middle sticks out in my memory. Mister Furious (he gets really, really, really angry - what an incredible power!) has gathered together a motley crew of superhero wannabe's, and they are confronting the master villain, Casanova Frankenstein. They trash his limousine. Broken windows and dents and stuff, while he sits inside. (They didn't feel they had enough evidence to arrest him at this point, I guess.) We see Mister Furious looking really elated as they vent their frustrations on an innocent automobile. I was thinking, "This is so pointless!" And then I thought, "Of course it's pointless! They're amateurs on a power trip, they don't know any better! Most of the things 'superheroes' do in the BADLY written comic books [though not all are bad] are equally childish when you think about them! I think the screenwriter understands that! I think he inserted this scene to show us just how pathetic these characters really are, thinking they're being heroic when all they're really doing is posturing and property damage!"
To do them justice, the Mystery Men showed more signs of heroism by the end of the movie, although since the whole thing was a comedy you had to expect a certain Corniness Factor to be involved. But I enjoyed the movie from beginning to end, and that's the acid test. I even would have paid money to see "Mystery Men 2" if they ever made one. It occurred to me at the time that to fully appreciate Mystery Men and what it was doing to the stale old comic book cliches about superheroes, it may be vitally important to have already read a wide selection of hundreds (or thousands) of superhero comic books by various writers, good and bad. Fortunately, I was amply qualified, but of course you already knew that :)
The Rocketeer. I really, really, really wanted a sequel to this one. The screenwriter had a deft touch with the dialogue that established the hero as a real human being with human problems instead of just some two-dimensional weirdo who only comes to life when he sees an excuse to pull on a costume and go beat people up. There was one lovely scene that I practically memorized the first time I saw it, where Cliff and his girlfriend Jennifer are arguing about something he didn't tell her immediately, and it was incredible the way what each person said kept escalating the tension back and forth, based on the way the other person kept misinterpreting what the previous person had just said as being much more of a biting criticism than it was really intended to be (in my opinion). In other words, its treatment of male/female social interaction struck me as darned realistic. :)
The Shadow. I've read reprints of several of his old pulp novels and it generally was not made clear that he had any honest-to-goodness psychic power to turn invisible in shadow. Also, the first scene establishes that the man who becomes the Shadow (Lamont Cranston) has a very bloody past before he gets reformed somehow by one of those mysterious old teachers in Tibet who are always doing that sort of thing in pulp fiction (and later in superhero stories. Marvel's Sorcerer Supreme, Dr. Strange, also studied for many long years in Tibet and reacquired a conscience in the process.) Again, the novels I've read didn't make the Shadow out to be a former butcher of innocent civilians. But if you can get past that, the movie is really very well done. I'm not saying I would want my sister to date the Shadow, but I thought Alec Baldwin's portrayal of him was convincing. Also, the screenwriter had a good sense of humor for the lighter moments, and that always helps liven up a story. Lovely visuals, if my opinin counts for something. (Critiquing the fine points of graphic design is beyond me. I can look at something and say I like it or I don't like it or it's too bland to get me excited either way. That about covers it. You've been warned.)
I know I said that just being a pulp hero doesn't make a superhero, but most of the ones I rejected from pulps and/or comic strips of the early 20th Century (Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, the Saint, Doc Savage, etc.) didn't have secret identities and weren't using a costume and mask to terrify evildoers. They were action heroes, but not superheroes. The Shadow carried a pair of .45 automatics and wasn't shy about using them, but his best stories were ones that emphasized solving mysteries rather than simply shooting his way in and out of every situation. He probably had a lot to do with the superhero boom a few years later in the comic books. Particularly influencing Batman, I believe. (Though few remember it today, Batman was also known to occasionally use a gun and other lethal techniques in fighting villains during the first year or two after his debut, when nobody - including artist Bob Kane who created him - knew just who he was or what sort of self-imposed rules he ought to live by. They have subsequently changed that to say that he never deliberately killed anyone in his life.)
Even though the Shadow carried guns and used them regularly, I'd say he firmly straddled the line between two categories: action hero (who regularly kills people) and superhero (who usually doesn't). Out of respect for his contributions to fictional crimefighting adventurers in various formats, I include his movie here.
Spider-Man. I would have been happier without the scene where Mary Jane Watson's dress gets soaked and we can see her nipples through the fabric. Did the producers really think this movie wouldn't make any money unless they stuck that in, just so that teenage boys would assure their friends that it had that titillating moment and thus was worth spending money on?
Having gotten that warning out of the way, I'll assure you that I loved the rest of the movie. Even the parts they changed (such as Spider-Man's webbing being organically generated in his wrists instead of mechanically generated according to a secret forumla as proof of his scientific genius). The first part of the movie was closely based upon the "real" Spider-Man origin story, including the horrifying realization that innocent blood was partially on his hands as a result of a terrible mistake on his part. The later part of the movie was closely based on what "really" happened to the original Green Goblin in later issues of Spidey's comics. One complaint I had was that Spider-Man's loudest critic, newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, didn't get much more than a cameo, but I admit you can't do everything at once. And they did arrange the guy's haircut to make him closely resemble the way he's usually drawn in the comics. I can appreciate that sort of attention to detail. All in all, this movie managed the old "suspension of disbelief" and had me all wrapped up in the personal problems of teenaged Peter Parker, as they came at him one after another without mercy. We've all had days (or weeks, or months) like that.
Superman. I thought they did a fine job of capturing the spirit of Superman in Christopher Reeve's first movie about him. Including the idea that Clark Kent deliberately hammed it up as a wimp in order to sharply contrast with his heroic persona. Yet he still showed clues to the real him, as in the lovely moment when he asks Lois (after she has beaten off a mugger, with some unseen help from Clark moving his hand at superspeed to catch the bullet in midair as he pretends to be fainting) if it was really worth the risk of getting killed for a few dollars and some other items which he lists. Lois stares into her purse and then demands to know how he knew. "Knew what?" "You've just described the exact contents of my purse! "Oh, really? Lucky guess."
Afterthoughts: Here are a few of the items that didn't make the Top Ten in my opinion.
I cut Superman IV: The Quest for Peace from the list, but it was a close call. Some people seem to loathe this movie. I watched it for the second time last December, during my research binge for this piece, and found it better than average. The nuclear-powered clone (or whatever he was called) was admittedly forgettable, what with being totally inarticulate and all, but he wasn't really all that important. I actually liked Lacy, the character played by Mariel Hemingway, who finally demonstrated that it was possible for a sane woman to appreciate Clark's finer qualities as a decent human being and ace journalist without having the ulterior motive of hoping that he was also the incredibly strong, etc., Superman. For those of us guys who think we're pretty nice people, but can't hope to compete with Superman (or even Arnold Schwarzenegger) in terms of physical prowess, it's comforting to see that some females are capable of ignoring the most superficial aspects of a superman.
Watching it last winter, I was struck by the bit where Lacy and Lois Lane are expecting Clark Kent and Superman to both appear for a sort of double date. The doorbell rings. Lacy lights up, saying "Clark!" and then, as an afterthought, adds in a more depressed tone, "Or maybe it's Superman." It's not every day that people react in that disappointed fashion to the idea that it might only be Superman ringing the doorbell.
This film also deserves credit for showing Superman trying to apply his great powers to solve a real-world problem, even if he finally decided he wasn't doing as much good as he thought he was.
On the other hand, M. Night Shyamalan's recent Unbreakable (starring Bruce Willis) wasn't even considered as a candidate because it isn't about a superhero at all. It certainly isn't an action flick. It's a suspenseful movie about a regular guy who gradually realizes that he really is as incredibly durable as a comic book fanatic (Samuel L. Jackson) keeps suggesting, although Willis could have tested the theory a heck of a lot sooner by trying to prick his own finger with a sterilized pin and seeing if it actually drew blood. At the end of the movie, he finally captures one criminal in a fight, but he hasn't come anywhere near creating a superheroic identity for himself. Unbreakable was intended as #1 in a trilogy (I kept thinking at the time I watched it that it would have made a pretty good pilot for a TV series), so it's possible that the later installments (if actually made) will someday qualify for my list of Best Superhero films.
The Captain America of 1990, Matt Salinger as the hero, struck me as a careful adapation of the basic concept of Captain America except for the embarrassing little detail that this version of Cap went on exactly one mission during World War II before being captured and ending up frozen solid for a few decades. (In the comics, Cap fought all through the war and only got frozen solid after he had a few years of combat experience under his belt. With the result that he emerged into the modern world as a very seasoned veteran.) There was nothing about it to make me call it one of the worst superhero films, and it didn't break any of my rules provided above. It did not, however, thrill me as much as they would have liked from the characterization standpoint, although I admit that Matt looked the way Captain America is supposed to look, just as Christopher Reeve did for Superman. Dusting off the hoary old cliche of having the major villain (the Red Skull) claim credit for real-life assassinations of the 20th Century, including (I think) both Kennedys in the 1960s, made me wince. If you believe all the fiction I've read which touches upon this subject, JFK in particular must have been shot about thirty-six times simultaneously by all those master assasins who had cleverly arranged to use Lee Harvey Oswald as their fall guy.
I haven't actually seen every superhero film that's ever come out of Hollywood. I am particularly deficient in watching pilot episodes of "feature" length for TV shows. Though I've done the best I can using the local video stores, it's possible that I'm missing a couple of really good items that have faded into obscurity. Let me know.
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Epinions.com ID:
lorendiac
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Location: Indianapolis
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"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." (Arthur C. Clarke)
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