Seven Super Psychopaths

What do Seven Psychopaths and Super have in common? Well I watched both of them last weekend, and they are both highly deconstructive. I don't want to give too much away about either of them, since both films thrive on surprise, but I'll be sort of specific at the same time.

With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.

Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.

Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.

I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.

So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.