If you expect to find out how anybody became a superhero, don’t bother. The misleading title aside, which is the same as the novel, written by Gérald Bronner, this movie has nothing interesting to offer. The characters are bland, the super powers are boring and the special effects are so-so at best. You could overlook all that and just go for the action but then again you would only watch the last few minutes and still come away disappointed.
The movie starts out well enough with an abduction and subsequently establishes an atmosphere of doom for the abducted superhero, who is he? Some performance artist, but we don’t care, plus it gets mentioned later on, that he really is just a nobody with shitty powers. Sure enough, we don’t get to see what happens to him, who cares, not even the writers do.
Wow, that must suck, so we get superheroes who “are perfectly integrated within society” as the synopsis claims while in the first few minutes it becomes apparent that this clearly is not the case, after all. OK, no big deal, the writers must have confused integration with isolation, happens. We also never get to find out how they got their powers. Suspension of disbelief! Well, wait a minute, why tell us this is about “how” you became a superhero, an origin story so to speak and then don’t cover any of that? I mean, I get it, it’s lazy writing… but this is just beyond lazy.
It could have been a decent film, if the characters were fleshed out a bit, give them an origin story, give them some notion of depth… the movie is full of missed opportunities on that part and instead jumbles together scenes to move along the excuse of a plot all of which we can see coming from a mile away. The dialogue is beyond cringeworthy. I thought it might be a translation issue so I switched to French, but no, it’s just as bad.
By the way, remember the guy who got abducted in the beginning? Guess what? He is still there now! Draining away in that abandoned building. A low life loser superhero with a dumb superpower, forgotten by the world. No one cares! That’s just cold, but as they say in French: “C’est la vie!”
Just watch “The Boys” instead, you’ll get your dose of “how” they became “superheroes” or “supervillains”, which is to say, this here might have worked better as a (mini)series. Then again, probably not.
