Rainn Wilson

Best known as Dwight, the perpetually failing schemer on "The Office," Rainn Wilson is blessed with a swell face for a cut-rate, homemade superhero mask.

Those glaring eyes really pop through. And the actor's way of italicizing his comic reactions to the latest perceived or genuine slight has a way of filling out even an ill-fitting crime fighter's uniform.

In writer-director James Gunn's "Super," Wilson plays Frank, a sullen fry cook who is good and sick of feeling like a loser. His recovering addict wife (Liv Tyler) has been seduced, both chemically and sexually, by a drug-dealing Lothario (Kevin Bacon).

Frank speaks to God, pleading for guidance.

Zoning out in front of the TV, watching a Christian network, Frank gets an idea via a superhero character known as The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion): Why not become his own superheroic savior, The Crimson Bolt, and get that woman off his back? With the hyperactive assistance of a comics store clerk who nicknames herself "Boltie," the wrench-wielding Frank starts putting both scum and casual transgressors alike in the hospital, or the morgue.

Ellen Page, as the clerk with the insatiable bloodlust, is the best thing about "Super."

"We could get claws! Like Wolverine!" she says, so excited she can barely contain herself. The face-gashings and blood geysers grow increasingly explicit in "Super," partly for laughs, partly because Gunn -- who started out writing for the notorious trashmeisters of Troma films and directed a very good killer movie, "Slither" -- has an interest in complicating, to some degree, the audience's attitude toward Frank. He's like the schlubby second cousin to the George C. Scott character in the revenge thriller "Hardcore," a scold when it comes to his sidekick's expletives ("No cussing!") and a righteous kettle of violence.

The film's limitation is its familiarity.

The notion of an ordinary citizen becoming a superhero, with or without superpowers, carries precious little creative currency at this point in time. Still, Wilson does amusingly steely work, while Page goes bonkers, giving her gleeful nut job one of the more memorable horselaughs in recent American film history.

 

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"Super" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: NR (extreme violence, language, some sexual material).

Running time: 1:36.

Cast: Rainn Wilson (Frank/Crimson Bolt); Ellen Page (Libby/Boltie); Liv Tyler (Sarah); Kevin Bacon (Jacques); Nathan Fillion (The Holy Avenger).

Credits: Written and directed by James Gunn; produced by Miranda Bailey and Ted Hope. An IFC Midnight release.

 

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