#89 - Comic Book Villains

I think I can. I think I can. I wish I could. I wish I could. Ah ..... oh ..... ahhhh ...... uhmmm ........ not quite. Sorry. This is the little cult movie that couldn't. It wants to. It wants to in the worst way. It has a lot of things going in its favor. Things that definitely help in the desire to be a cult favorite type movie. But there are a number things about it that get in the way and it inevitably falls just short.

For those of you who don't know, and I am assuming this means all of you, I'll give a brief plot summary. In Smalltown, USA, we have two rival comic book shops. One is run by Donal Logue, a lifetime comic book purist. The other is run by Michael Rapaport and is more successful because they also sell toys, stickers, etc. A rich kid comic book fan lets both of them in on a secret collection of comic books that was owned by a recently deceased resident of their very town. What follows is are the cutthroat attempts by these two rivals to own this holy grail of comic book collections. I like to think of it as a dad in a crappy family sitcom on Fox versus a dad in a crappy family sitcom on Fox.

Sounds like a good premise, but where everything goes wrong is that it doesn't make up it's mind about what kind of movie it wants to be. There's a bit of the movie that attempts to be in the same vein as a Kevin Smith movie, especially parts of Mallrats and Chasing Amy, but the writing isn't quite up to par with Smith's. In Kevin Smith movies, the characters have legitimate literary debates about characters, storylines, and artwork. In this movie, it's more about how much comic book trivia Logue's character knows. Not as amusing, or effective.

Ultimately, this movie is a dark comedy because these people go to pretty extreme measures to obtain a fortune in comic book gold. This is fine. I would have no problems with that if they maintained the style throughout the movie. For example, there are scenes that have a quirky musical score playing underneath them. It's kind of like a Danny Elfman score, but more from Pee Wee's Big Adventure than any of his other stuff, and not as good. An Elfman sound would have fit a dark comedy, but they chose the wrong one to emulate, and the one they did doesn't fit with the Kevin Smith-esque moments. And then there is Cary Elwes' character, who we first see in a strip club drinking beer watching his girlfriend dance. He kind of treats her rudely, but that's okay because he's the heavy. He is the one Logue hires to steal the comics. You see, he's a bad guy, and we know this. Given that, I am at a loss to find the reasoning behind the scene where he is lying with his girlfriend, in the house he is renovating, talking about where he is going to put her music studio because he is doing all of this for her. Awwwww, it's so sentimental and unbelievably out of place for this movie, and his character. He's the tough guy. He's the mean bad ass. If you put an emotional aspect to his character into the movie, you have to keep it in the movie beyond the scene where you introduce it. Otherwise, that scene is an anomaly and should have been cut.

There is a lot of stuff in this movie that I really like. The relationship between Michael Rapaport and Natasha Lyonne is quite odd. I would have liked to have seen more. Donal Logue's character turns out to be really sleazy, skeezy, and pretty interesting, I would have liked to have seen it used better. And in my opinion, Danny Masterson is underused, while DJ Qualls is overused. This is probably because I like Masterson more, but he also seems to have the right wiring in his head for a dark comedy. Plus, the movie uses DJ Qualls as the narrator and apparently the main character, but really, the story revolves around Logue, so less Qualls would have worked. I guess what it all boils down to is that I would have told the story differently, or at least tweaked the screenplay in a number of ways.