Mystery Men

I guess these days I am in a mood for a style of storytelling that comes from the comic books. After an amazing Black Cat, White Cat Italian-dark-comic style, comes a time for a Hollywood version of comics, the Mystery Men. It is a relatively enjoyable and interesting film.

As the film starts, we see an opening shot of Champion City, a fairy tale-like city, where the regular North American downtown business center 100-floor buildings are shaped like Count Dracula's castle, zooming onto the old folks' home where there is a party for singles going on. Fellini's concept of putting as many objects into the single shot is here badly misused, because all the objects are completely irrelevant, but funny as if taken from some sensible story and glued to this one.

In come the thieves that are after the old folks' money. For people that have seen the film, City of Lost Children, a brilliant fairy tale, the villains seem very familiar--they are an exact replica of the Cyclops from the other film. As they are robbing the guests, we see the shot of Tom Waits who I assume wandered in accidentally.

And our heros appear. Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller) shows amazing strength when mad, but the villains from the wrong story beat him up, The Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) is a loveable character due to the actor's abilities to pull out of the dreck that is his character, the fork and spoon operator who shoots forks into his enemies and speaks with strange but sweet combination of his Apu character in The Simpsons and a proper British gentleman. And the Shoveller (William H. Macy) who uses his shovel for a weapon. As they are getting beaten up, the Captain Amazing enters and defeats the villains. Tom Waits meets our heroes and introduces himself as an inventor of weapons that is here "just to meet chicks," and in ten seconds draws enormous response from the audience.

Captain Amazing, who wears all the ads of his sponsors on his suit, the idol of our heroes, is having his problems. After he got rid of all the crime in the city, his PR manager is unable to give him any more publicity than a mere rescue at the old folks' home, which results in losing his Pepsi endorsement. So he decides to set his arch-villain Casanova Frankenstein free from the asylum he put him into.

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