Defendor

So, I watched "Defendor" last night, under the pretense that it was some kind of darkly comic take on superheroes (kind of, I don't know, "Mystery Men" meets "Taxi Driver" or something). The trailer certainly makes it seem like that...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do7ur4ji7r8

But no. It's not like that at all. The trailer is misleading. I'm not even going to put a spoiler warning in this, because there's nothing to spoil. Woody does a good job with his character, but he goes almost "full retard" on it (to coin the term thrown out in "Tropic Thunder") -- Arthur Poppington in it is a serious mental defective and/or mentally-ill guy who's a nitwit wannabe do-gooder. There's more than a little "Don Quixote" in this quest for justice, with the prostitute/junkie played by Kat Denning as his Sancho Panza -- alternately, Arthur is Jesus and Kat Denning's character is Mary Magdalene. There are plenty of "This Is Jesus" movies out there, where a simple-but-good character offers some redemption for a dirty, ugly world (typically by dying). It's been done and done.

This movie is at war with what it's trying to say -- the comedic possibilities of it are completely undermined by the obvious handicaps of Arthur. The guy needs institutionalization or at least a halfway house. The weight of his moral crusade is offset by his near-inability to really clearly see reality around him -- that's the Don Quixote in the mix. Captain Industry is his image of evil, and he fixates on this Serbian crimelord (who could be windmill or Satan, you choose) as Captain Industry, and tries to go after him bravely, and stupidly, and becomes martryed -- inspiring people in the world around him to do and be better people.

The bad guys are just footnotes in the movie -- they're bad because they're bad, and we don't see much of them, not nearly enough. Kat (I'm not even digging again for her character's name, it's too much work) is the snarky hooker with a heart of gold who gloms onto Defendor for some reason. Blah blah blah.

I read that this was director (and writer) Peter Stebbing's first effort, and it shows in my view -- the narrative is just off, the characterizations are off, the pacing is bad, the movie doesn't know what it's trying to be (except, as I see it, a vaguely Catholic Christ-influenced superhero narrative in the mold of, say, "Constantine," "Hellboy," "The Crow," "Dogma," "Forrest Gump," "The Matrix," and probably "Legion" -- although I didn't see that last one). Movies with that emphasis you can kind of spot because the people in it area invariably wretches kind of at odds with life and with themselves, and are, in some way, shape, and form, healed by the redemptive power of the nitwit Messiah and his sacrifice.

I would have preferred it to have been more like "Taxi Driver" if it wanted to be serious; or more like "Mystery Men" if it wanted to be funny. But while it's framed as an action/comedy-drama, there is precious little comedy in it, and while it strives for some kind of poignancy, it just amounts to a stupid man going up against evil men, and in his stupidity (while condemning himself to death), manages to bring them to justice.

To fix the movie, I'd have increased the pacing of it, the dramatic structure, made it either funny or serious (or at least seriously funny), would have aced Kat Denning's pointless character and upped the role of the friend who cares for his half-retarded buddy, Arthur, and would have beefed up the roles of the villains in it considerably.

Anyway, don't see it expecting it to be funny or exciting (e.g., action) because it's not. Apparently the studios wouldn't touch this movie because they found it difficult to characterize, and that was a wise move on their parts -- some things things are difficult to characterize because they're visionary; other things are difficult to characterize because they suck. This is the latter. It doesn't suck completely -- it could have been good, but it needed serious work on the script to actually flow properly.

Watch "The Crow" -- it's a far better movie.