Mystery Men is one of those things that probably looked like a winner on paper -- hip cast, satiric premise, some special effects, etc. But rather than a nearly two-hour film, it would have been much better as a running skit on, say, the old Ben Stiller Show, which ran for far too short of a time.
MM is a sendup of the standard superhero formula, where a cast of wannabe misfits band together to save Champion City's "real" superhero, Captain Amazing, who gets himself captured through his own cynical machinations. (This is sort of where the wheels come off this thing, trying to build an entire movie on this flimsy premise.)
Champion City is apparently some alternate universe, where the Cyrillic alphabet contains the letter "I", and Corvettes are made of metal. Never mind, it's all supposed to be very atmospheric and Burtonesque. Or maybe it's just supposed to add to the overall silliness. And it is that; there is the silliness of the "Blue Raja" (Hank Azaria), a fork-thrower who wears no blue, affects a pussy limey accent and loves his mommy. Or "The Spleen" (a largely wasted Paul Reubens), who farts on his opponents. Or there's Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), who fancies himself a volcano of temper and mayhem, but has trouble even cracking a decent insult. Oh the hijinks, how they do ensue.
Stiller Show alumna Janeane Garofalo, along with Stiller himself, is about the only one with a real flair for this material, which is why I say this would have worked much better as a series of 10-minute skits on that show. (Imagine what superheroes Andy Dick and Bob Odenkirk would have been.) Garofalo looks like hell, sporting a truly distracting amount of eye makeup. The rest of the movie is a mish-mash of silly gags that lead nowhere, and the feeling halfway through that this is all there is.
It's not terrible, there are some decent bits in it and it is, after all, a comic-book story, but the material gets stretched too thin for a full-length movie. Fun for a rainy day or slow night. Two planets out of five.
