James Gunn’s ‘Super’ Was an Intriguing Stepping Stone to ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’

A bizarre yet hilarious character study that examines a true misfit

It’s kind of funny to look back at James Gunn’s career trajectory: starting out as a trash horror enthusiast at Troma Entertainment to later become Marvel's golden boy with a franchise making billions of dollars and turning misfits into pop culture icons. Who would've thought, right? Well, the signs were clearly there.

After writing a few screenplays that turned into major commercial successes (Scooby-Doo, Dawn of the Dead), Gunn established his style as an up-and-coming filmmaker with Slither, a cult horror-comedy he wrote and directed. It was the perfect example of what happens when you set a fanboy loose, letting his imagination run wild to make a picture he envisioned without restrictions. Though Slither wasn’t a box office triumph, it set Gunn on a path of exploration.

Super, his second feature, was evidently an attempt to find his voice outside of horror while implementing a similar tone and the same bizarre sense of humor that distinguished him from others. While his directorial debut was more of a homage to classic genre tropes, his second film took a less conventional route to create a blueprint for the odd reject-type hero. It failed commercially and critically at the time, but it helped Gunn to crystallize and fuel his fascination with misfits.

Super’s protagonist, Frank Darbo (Rainn Wilson), is a loser: uninteresting, out of shape, the type of man who’s been an easy target for bullies his entire life. Now, in his 40s, his biggest asset is his wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler), a gorgeous woman wildly out of his league. She used to be an addict before Frank helped her get out of that situation. She married him out of gratitude more than anything else. But he can't even keep her when a handsome drug dealer (Kevin Bacon as a beguiling scumbag) purposely tries to pull her back into drugs. Losing Sarah, however, triggers a turning point in Frank’s life, and he decides to get her back no matter what it takes.

But Frank is also a weirdo, so the traditional methods don't work for him. After an unsuccessful attempt to get law enforcement involved and a beating from Sarah's new boyfriend, he desperately asks God for guidance. He appears to him in the ridiculous form of the Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion), a righteous and alarmingly religious character out of a terrible TV show, who gives him a purpose to become a superhero and fight crime. So he does. Frank goes to the local comic book store to brainstorm ideas, and before long he becomes The Crimson Bolt — a crusader with a pipe wrench, a poor man’s Deadpool costume, and no power whatsoever.

Naturally, Gunn presents all this as one big joke (besides a horrifically off-putting sequence with tentacles doing a lobotomy on Frank), taking the bonkers insanity as far as possible. Despite the limitations of a very low budget, the director fills the picture with inventive visual and narrative gimmicks, going hard on excessive violence, obscenity, and black humor. And as skulls crack, bones break, and heads explode between insults and a tangibly weird sexual energy, something is happening underneath the surface, too. We begin to like and feel for Frank. By going on this strange crusade to win his girl back, we get to know him intimately as he opens up more and more, exposing an inherent vulnerability.

This, of course, is mainly due to Rainn Wilson’s wacko energy and offbeat delivery that parallels his beloved maniac, Dwight, in The Office (Super was shot during the sitcom’s heyday), which carries that necessary flavor that made him so great on that show. But he goes beyond solely being a lunatic here, conveying depth and a touching sensitivity that easily resonates with the viewer. Sure, this is a much rawer and less-polished protagonist than any member of the Guardians, but it's clearly a prototype of the deviant/reject character type that Gunn made to perfection in his trilogy a few years later. Developing Frank was an experiment in understanding what makes such a loser so fascinating and likable.

Thus, it's somewhat strange that Super took longer to find its audience, but some factors went against it at the time of its release. It came out soon after Kick-Ass (a thematically almost identical superhero flick with a much bigger budget), was designed for adults, and its message was hard to pin down. But I believe the latter was Gunn's intention from the get-go — purposely mixing different genres and aiming for a bit of controversy with a bloody and unapologetic approach that went in an unexpected direction than other similar movies. In the end, his plan worked out, though: once released on VOD and DVD, the film found the right audience and quickly obtained the cult status it aspired for from the beginning.

Undoubtedly, Super is absurd, not very viewer-friendly, and at times just as confusing as it is moving (that ending will never stop spiraling in my mind), but it's also an unmistakable predecessor (in spirit, at least) to the Guardians of Galaxy and what came after. Cinematic weirdos are cool now, and it would be a shame to forget that one of the first of them was The Crimson Bolt the moment he exclaimed, "Shut up, crime!"

Super is available to rent on Amazon Prime Video.

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Last week I reviewed Sam Esmail’s apocalyptic Netflix mystery, Leave the World Behind, and shared the list of my favorite movies and TV shows from 2023.

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