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Champion City is a place that looks like its planners worship Ridley Scott and Tim Burton the way Orlando (the city in Florida, not the singer who’s feuding with Wayne Newton) venerates The Mouse. It’s one great big crumbling gothic neon advertisement -- perfect breeding ground for Mystery Men, a brace of aspiring superheroes who, if they were a TV show, would be “The B Team”...although that’s being generous. There’s Blue Raja:Master of Silverware (Hank Azaria), an effete fork-throwing pseudo-Brit who lives with his mom (Louise Lasser -- remember her?) and won’t touch anything so usefully threatening as a knife because that would be gauche; The Shoveler (William H. Macy), a blue-collar guy with a longsuffering wife and kids, whose talent would be a big help in a snowstorm or cave-in but doesn’t strike much fear into chronic offenders; and malaprop-spouting Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), who, well, doesn’t do much, really, except ride around on a “Harley compatible” and labor under the notion that, if he’s provoked enough, mayhem will ensue. Sadly for the good guys, that threshold has never been crossed.
But they’re the only hope the city has when its smug billionaire protector Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), who’s done such a good job through the years locking up colorful maniacs that a dwindling market is costing him his Pepsi endorsement, helps get archenemy Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) paroled, and the disco fiend captures and threatens to kill him as thanks. After recruiting some new members -- Invisible Boy (Nickelodeon star Kel Mitchell), whose purported tree-falling-in-the-forest trick only works if no one is watching; the lisping, intestinally lethal Spleen (Paul Reubens); and the only properly dangerous character in the whole bunch, The Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), out to avenge the death of her similarly named father (“He fell down an elevator shaft -- onto some bullets.”) by wielding a ball encasing his telekinetic skull -- they find some tentative, confidence-inspiring success in trashing Frankenstein’s Corvette stretch limo. But to rescue the Captain, they’re going to need serious refinement. Enter The Sphinx (Wes Studi, probably best know for playing Val Kilmer’s hallucination in The Doors), an experienced crusader from Memphis who “can cut guns in half with his mind,” to put the team through superhero boot camp and encourage them make shiny new outfits. After enlisting additional help from a carny weapons designer (Tom Waits -- !!), who contributes such non-lethal devices as Tornado in a Can and a Blame Thrower, they head off to storm Frankenstein’s lair.
Based on the Dark Horse comic by Bob Burden, Mystery Men is the first film directed by Kinka Usher, who -- grab something firmly fastened to the floor -- did the first “Yo quiero Taco Bell” commercials. But don’t let that keep you from seeing his movie. Mystery Men may seem to start a little slowly, but it gives the characters time to fully develop, setting up a plot that not only showcases all of its many comedic talents, but enthusiastically skewers such superhero cliches as rampant Zen doubletalk (“He who questions training only trains himself in asking questions.”) and the team dynamic wherein eventually even the puniest, least practical talent will prove to be the only thing between them and a messy cross-molecular deframmitizing. With great costumes by Marilyn Vance (The Rocketeer) and sets by Kirk M. Petrucelli (Blade), this, like The Matrix, shows that, given the opportunity, young trendy directors can sometimes spend a bigger budget more wisely than their more well-established contemporaries. B
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