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*This review contains spoilers.*
Superhero Movie is about how a teenage guy is bitten by a radioactive insect, gains its powers, and uses it to stop crime. In other words, a spoof of Spider-Man.
I'm not a very big fan of the "_____ Movie" series that was started by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Setzer. All of their movies boil down to shallow parodies of numerous cinema franchises. By no means is Superhero Movie a unique entry in the series that abandons this formula, as you can see from the poster and DVD box art. However, while Superhero Movie is yet another forgettable entry in the series, its director, Craig Mazin, is actually a much better director and writer than the founders of the series themselves.
For one thing, Craig Mazin actually does other things beside making parody movies like Superhero Movie. He worked on the Hangover sequel, for example, which wasn't too terrible. The only other "Movie" movies that he worked on were Scary Movie 3 and 4, which were still bad, but compared to Meet the Spartans and the aptly named Disaster Movie, they're not as bad. Another small merit that Mazin has over Friedberg and Setzer is that the latter two's movies, such as Disaster Movie and Epic Movie, have only a couple of disaster or epic movies lampooned and the rest are other films that came out at the time. These other movies not relevant to the parody's title are less apparent in Mazin's "Movie" entries, though they're still there.
Sometimes, Superhero Movie has some decent gags in it, like the parody of Steven Hawking and a few others, but these instances are very rare and it requires the audience to sit down for more than twenty minutes with this movie. The rest of the gags range from generic to dated to unbearable. Many of them are poorly done sex jokes or pop culture references, though when I say "many", I mean "almost all of them". There's a scene in the movie with two human-shaped balloons in a...suggestive position as the main character is walking by. That's the joke. There's no buildup, no punchline, just two balloons making love to each other, no rhyme or reason. Trust me, this is how a lot of the jokes in this movie are going to turn out.
The plot is a parody of the original Spider-Man movie: kid gets superpowers, things don't go so well at the beginning, villain shows up to do something horrible to the hero (in this case, it's killing his aunt), hero wins against villain, hero gets the girl. Everything else is irrelevant.
Drake Bell stars as Rick Riker, the main character in this movie, and Sara Paxton as Jill Johnson, his love interest. They're not that bad in this movie, but not too good either. Drake Bell has certainly seen darker moments in his acting career (Yours, Mine and Ours and College come to mind), though this is probably the darkest moment in Sara Paxton's (Even Shark Night 3D was better than this garbage.)
If you're a fan of the "Movie" series (though I don't think there are many), you may like this. If you're a big superhero fan and want to see someone parody Marvel Comics properties, there's a slim chance that you'll like this. Other than that, Superhero Movie has a strictly teenage target demographic. It's too mature for kids, yet too immature for adults. However, even if you fall into the target audience, you probably won't like this movie. There's much better parody out there.
2/10
