Written and Directed by Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore
Comic book movies have reached well beyond their saturation point. Advances in digital technology have enabled characters like Spiderman and Superman to come across today with their full breadth of powers on screen, wowing audiences worldwide. But there was a time in cinema when simple trickery had to be employed to make us believe that Batman could even turn his head in ‘Batman’ (1989). After the success of that film, a serious of “street level” superhero and comic-based movies were made, varying in success from Dick Tracy to The Crow to The Phantom. Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore’s ‘Special’ is a movie that harkens back to that low-fi 90’s era of comics on screen.
Les (Michael Rapaport) is a parking attendant who lives alone and enjoys reading comic books. He participates in a clinical study for a new medication called “Special” which is an undisclosed new form of anti-depressant. Naturally, things go awry. The tightrope that the film walks is that it’s not that Les gains superpowers; it’s that he thinks he has. Les’ own transformation as he tries to make the most of his newly found powers (aka, his decline into insanity) is well played by Rapaport, who finally shows something more than the New York thug character type casting he has mostly been relegated to. The film is make-or-break on his performance and he gives it his all, reminding me of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler at times for some reason. Perhaps the grainy urban cinematography has something to do with it.
The upside is that the film plays with the archetypes of the hero’s journey as if Les really was going through them all to be a better savior in the end. There is the mentor figure/ doctor who is responsible for his powers (The Big Lebowski’s Jack Kehler), the supportive friends/ owners of Les’ local comic shop, the love interest/a checkout girl at the supermarket, and of course the diabolical villains who are entwined with our hero/ businessmen who engineered the drug. Unfortunately, these same archetypes make for easy stereotypes. The businessmen, despite trying to convince Les that he is imagining everything, really do act like Lex Luthor-style scumbags. They drive around in a limo and the main one is named Jonas Exiler (Paul Blackthorne), who looks and acts like a low rent Hugo Weaving. It always feels like he one step away from suddenly strapping Les to a table with a slow moving laser pointed at him. The comic book store-owning brothers Everett (Robert Baker) and Joey (Josh Peck) are such poorly written clichés that they could very well have been Walt and Steve-Dave from an early Kevin Smith film. They treat their customers like crap and spend their time debating meaningless topics or getting high. Only the doctor is given anything to work with, caught in the middle of a company who wants to make money and his allegiance to the health of his patient.
The idea of a person with no powers thinking they can save the world is nothing new. This story takes it one step forward, as psychoanalysis of someone like Batman in the real world would always lead to the conclusion he must be delusional. Here we see how a person who just goes around tackling those that he thinks are criminals would just end up going down an extremely destructive path. But in the end it all feels like something we’ve seen before with a slight twist that isn’t enough to save it. If the film stuck to its guns and allowed Les to die or “lose” in the end, we would feel the weight of a moral lesson. Instead, the film just errs on the side of super-fiction, giving us a hero triumphantly walking away and a villain clenching his fist and saying “Bah! Next time!”
** Two Stars – See it if you must
After existing in limbo for several years, Special is now on DVD.
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