Super (18)

Starring: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler

A black comedy from the uncool end of the Kick-Ass classroom. Rainn Wilson plays sad schlub Frank, whose pretty wife (Liv Tyler) has just run off with a sleazeball drug-dealer (Kevin Bacon).

Brooding upon his loss Frank turns deluded avenger, prowling the streets in a DIY superhero outfit and calling himself The Crimson Bolt. It's more pitiful than funny, and when Frank starts trying to fight "crime" with a monkey wrench to the perpetrator's head the results are calamitous. His moral discrimination is skew-whiff: he metes out the same punishment to people who butt into cinema queues as to drug dealers and child molesters. His willing disciple, a comic-book store assistant played by Ellen Page, only ups the ante on his crime-busting agenda – shopping for firearms, making pipe bombs, etc. Writer-director James Gunn eventually loses control of the tone, which slips from deadpan to deadly and trashes what little amusement there was in a finale of gruesome violence.