I feel like, as millenials, so many of us grew up with VHS tapes. And, in amongst those VHS tapes, there was always one that seemed to manifest itself into your collection, with no real reason. Nobody could remember buying it, nobody really knew what it was about, but one particularly rainy afternoon when the board games had lost their allure, we would end up sticking it on. That VHS, for me, was Mystery Men.
It’s a movie I have literally never encountered outside of that VHS tape – to this day, I’m not sure if it just existed behind the Simpsons video collection in our living room alone. And it sort of makes sense – it’s such a bizarre little movie on paper, it’s not a surprise that it was a flop on release. Pulling barely half of its $68 million dollar budget, the 1999 flick was the debut – and only – feature from Kinka Usher, who had spent most of his time in advertising till that point in his career. Loosely based on the Flaming Carrot Comics series, Mystery Men is a pastiche of the superhero genre, nearly a decade before Iron Man would turn it into cinema’s most dominant force.
And, because it came out long before the run of current superhero media, there’s something oddly quaint about Mystery Men. It’s making some loving fun of the classic superhero comics, with lantern-jawed do-gooders and goons a-plenty (and God, did that term have a different meaning when this movie came out), and doing it with an almost ridiculously-overqualified cast. William H Macy, Ben Stiller, and Hank Azaria star as various would-be superheroes, and what they bring to this film is unmatched – there’s a level of commitment to the ridiculousness here that only really comes from people who have such a tight grasp on what they’re doing, and I still find Macy’s The Shoveller a truly iconic superhero.
But what makes this film such an interesting watch in the present day, I think, is how much it underlines what has changed in the world of superhero cinema. If the pastiche is the distillation of the genre to its purest degree, this version of the superhero genre is long-missed – one that’s genuinely fun and deliberately separate from the real world. Compare this to the cloying self-satisfaction of modern pastiches like Deadpool – in the age of dreadful, endless, gritty realism across so many superhero movies and TV shows, there’s something so contrived and carefully-constructed in Mystery Men, a proper little confection of a movie in the way it looks, the way it’s written, and the way it plays out. It’s a throwback to when these stories were fun, and when taking the loving piss out of them was even moreso.
I’m still not entirely convinced that anyone has seen this movie except me and my family, but I have a huge soft spot for this turn-of-the-century pastiche. Have you seen of Mystery Men? And what was the VHS that mysteriously manifested in your living room? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via the Independent)
No But Listen 