After what happened last time I reviewed a film by writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer with Daniel Isn’t Real last year… not gonna lie, I was slightly dreading his latest. Not because I was expecting it to be bad; I have enough faith in SpectreVision to not steer me wrong, and same goes for the filmmaker behind one of my favourites from 2019. Rather, it’s because of what writing about that film got out of me, and even for how TMI quite a few of my reviews can get, that one went further than most in describing my own history with mental health. I just got done with a pretty heavy review with If Anything Happens I Love You, and I don’t exactly have the energy for an encore at present. Which is why I’m rather thankful that Mortimer’s latest isn’t just a switch-up from what came before, but breaks new ground for SpectreVision’s genre spectrum as well.
Actually, flag on the play: This isn’t really all that new for Mortimer himself. While markedly different from the psychological touches of Daniel Isn’t Here, him doing a superhero film makes more sense when you learn that he started out making comic books, and was even reported to be working with Grant friggin’ Morrison on a movie (that sadly didn’t actualise). That familiarity with the format (ditto for Joe Manganiello as the delightfully-named Max Fist, as well as Paul ‘wrote a Deadpool comic where marine bestiality saved the day’ Scheer in a minor role as a crazed drug dealer) shows as his take on the format may not be all that original, but it certainly takes the superhero-on-film down some interesting directions.
Opening with an animated sequence bursting with that SV colour palette, showing how Max Fist arrived on our little blue marble (the use of which is recurrent whenever we flashback to his home planet of Chromium), the film basically utilises Hancock the same way Daniel Isn’t Real utilised Drop Dead Fred; isolating the more confronting aspects of the story and bringing them right out into the open. And in Max, we get a what-if scenario akin to Quentin Tarantino’s beautiful description of Shyamalan’s Unbreakable: What if Superman travelled from the comic book world to our own, but lost all his powers in the process? Going from god-like status on Chromium to being stripped of it in a social-media-saturated landscape where status means everything. A tenth-dimensional traveller (again, that Morrison influence poking through) reduced to a drunken hobo who lives under a bridge.
However, for all the cute little bits of comic book lore embedded throughout (including a nice reference to Spider Jerusalem), the superhero side of things is only half of the story. The other half involves two siblings, with one (Skylan Brooks’ Hamster) trying to get into the social media hustle and the other (Zolee Griggs’ Indigo) trying to get out of the drug hustle. If this is starting to sound too much like Kin with the juggling of grounded crime drama with high-concept sci-fi, at least know that this manages to balance those two aspects far better than that film ultimately did. Mainly because the two are inexorably linked to each other.
Something I’ve noticed about Adam Egypt Mortimer as a storyteller is that he has a thing for making his main characters confront dark reflections of themselves. The serial killer in New Year’s Eve, the bullied girl in Some Kind Of Hate, the schizophrenic in Daniel Isn’t Real; they all ended up encountering those who represented the darkest part of the self. The ego, the want for revenge, the person who would do the things they wouldn’t or couldn’t.
With this film, that manifests as an example of influence on society. On one end, you’ve got Max Fist, a hero right out of the Golden Age who was worshipped by his people. And on the other, you’ve got The Manager (Glenn Howerton) and his shady boss, who control the population of the city through crime and drug distribution. And in their own ways, they’re both just as hazardous.
Manganiello plays Max Fist as someone carrying around a lot of self-loathing, a lack of purpose without his former abilities, and going full Dark Age when he decides to help the siblings get out of The Manager’s web. It draws a connection between street crime and the uber-powerful heroes that fight it and comes to the same conclusion: It’s all about violence. It gets summed up pretty succinctly by one of The Manager’s goons (introduced while carrying a book titled Nihilism For Beginners), saying this life of violence is meant to deflect away from the agony of self. The self that is easier to take out on the rest of the world than it is to confront head-on.
It’s an Alan Moore-esque deconstruction of superhero tropes and just how tragic it all becomes when you put them into a real-world context, added to by how much comic book lore and visual technique exists within the margins. I can see it rubbing some audiences the wrong way, as it’s essentially a story where Superman takes a fall and becomes the Punisher, but the attention to thematic detail warmed my Vertigo-addicted heart and made for a solid viewing experience. Elijah Wood has backed another winner.
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