Superhero Movie

The nerd-will-rise saga of Spider-Man (with occasional borrowings from Batman and X-Men) anchors this latest, predictably feeble entry into the recent-movies-get-parodied comedy pool. No surprise that it traffics in the kind of cruel humour popular with high-school bullies and back-slapping in-jokes that could only be funny to people who aren’t actually "in.” Drake Bell stars as the Peter Parker stand-in, deeply horny for the blonde girl next door (Sara Paxton) and completely pathetic in every department. What a difference a radioactive dragonfly makes — soon he’s both ineptly reckoning with his newfound superpowers and the implacable menace of super-villain Hourglass (Christopher McDonald). Writer/director Craig Mazin does his level best to remind us of every single classic scene and story beat from the first Spidey saga but his humour is either pathologically driven to punish virgins and Stephen Hawking (even, ignorantly, conflating the two concepts) or so mildly spun on the source material that you wonder just what was supposed to be funny. There isn’t a single hilarious moment in the movie — the Airplane hand-me-downs are by now so familiar that they have no effect. Clearly a cash grab (and, thankfully, an unsuccessful one), it gives the impression of having been torn off on the kind of kegger weekend where it’s probably best enjoyed. Extras include a commentary with Mazin and producers David Zucker and Robert K. Weiss that proves unenlightening, an alternate ending that’s even more of a whimper than the one in the final cut, deleted scenes and a couple of fairly useless featurettes on the cast and the spoof concept.