I Am Squeegee Man! Do You Sense Its Power???

I prefer to think of "B-list" actors as "working actors". They're the guys you recognize because they spend so much time in front of the screen, be it large or small, and they're able to spend so much time there because they can't command A-list salaries. And because working actors are constantly, um, working, they have a lot of practical opportunities to hone their craft...and wind up turning out more consistently enjoyable and varied performances than some A-listers I could name. When the B-list gets together en masse, you know you're in for a quality time.

My favourite comedy to date is the Marx Brothers Duck Soup. Seated shortly below it, hovering somewhere in an amorphous blob with UHF, The Wrong Guy, The Big Lebowski, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz and The Court Jester is one that may make you say, "I've never heard of it": Mystery Men.

Based on a middling-popular Dark Horse comic series, made before comic-book movies were cool, and boasting a cast that reads like a B-list almanac, Mystery Men doesn't sound like a recipe for success. Judging by how few people I know who've seen it, it wasn't. A spot-on parody of the superhero genre, Mystery Men follows a trio of B-list, part-time superheroes as they fight mostly for the right to be considered legitimate superheroes. Champion City already has a resident superhero, Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear, spoofing Batman), and he keeps the streets clean by himself. When the streets get too clean, CA's popularity and product-placement revenue start to dwindle, and he organizes the release of his asylum-bound arch-nemesis so that things can get exciting again. Unfortunately, after seventeen years in the nut house, Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) is ready for him, and it's up to Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller, before he was famous), The Shoveler (William H. Macy), and The Blue Rajah (Hank Azaria) to free the Captain from Casanova's clutches. As The Blue Rajah bitterly observes, there are never any evil trios (they're all about the travelling gangs), so to even the playing field the gang starts recruiting. Winding up with The Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), The Spleen (Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Ruebens), The Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell, the only unfamiliar face in this crown), and being taken under the leadership wing of the terribly mysterious Sphinx (Wes Studi), bonding, mis-flipped toggles, and general hilarity ensue as they plan and enact a series of assaults on Casanova's castle.

I would go so far as to call this film brilliant. Almost every line of dialogue is quotable on its own merits, the production looks like a comic book (always a nice touch), and did I mention that the cast also includes Eddie Izzard as one of the leaders of Casanova's main gang, The Disco Boys? This film works because the cast rises to the occasion of earnestness, embracing their characters, delivering their lines in straightforward manners, and quietly reveling in all the ridiculousness that can be mined from the world of superhero comics. Few films boast such solid acting and direction whilst simultaneously providing a laugh a minute (lllliterally). I've watched this one upwards of ten times since it first came out - the dialogue makes it a great thing to have on in the background whilst cleaning or doing homework or something else tedious that prevents you from looking up at the screen too often but doesn't take a lot of mental effort.

I also may finally read the source comic, if the library has it, because I'm curious to see if the social commentaries hinted at in Mystery Men (the film) are more pronounced in Mystery Men (the comic). The core trio - The Shoveler, The Blue Rajah, and Mr. Furious - represent particular social archetypes: respectively, the blue-collar family man, the older guy who lives with his mom, and the late twentysomething (or early thirtysomething) loser with a dead-end job and little else. For something more blunt, the Invisible Boy is under the "care" of a father who can't concern himself to acknowledge the kid's existence. And it may be more than coincidence that The Disco Boys just happen to have two leaders, one white and one black, in charge of a gang that bases itself on a style and genre inseparable from the decade when race relations in American really started to take off. So I wonder...

Not to say you should watch Mystery Men with the mindset of something serious. But watch it you should - it's stupendously good for a laugh.