Super Cuts

Of all the things that cause me to miss out on potentially quality movies, one of the biggest is my aversion to gore. I don't mind violence at all, but once the skulls start getting split or the arms get chopped off, I'm out of there. I love a good scare, I just don't equate being scared with being grossed out.

Finding the line between acceptable violence and unacceptable gore is a delicate balancing act, and I don't always get it right. A friend and I watched Super over the weekend (at my insistence, even), and although I knew it was going to be brutally violent, I wasn't prepared for the extreme level of realistic gore. I wound up having to watch half of it through my fingers, and averted my eyes at several points, only to be forced to listen to the squishy noises of various people having their various body parts forcibly removed.

Still, for all I couldn't handle, it didn't wind up being nearly as terrible an experience as it could have. All in all, it was a pretty entertaining movie. Rainn Wilson plays a socially-maladjusted diner cook who turns to vigilante justice after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a sleazy drug dealer (Kevin Bacon). Ellen Page rounds out the cast as a comic book clerk who enthusiastically joins the cause as sidekick to "The Crimson Bolt", and the two of them get to fighting crime. It doesn't matter if you're a rapist or just a guy who cuts the line at the movies; you break the law, you get a pipe wrench to the head.

There have been a few normal-person-assumes-mantle-of-crime-fighter movies lately, so they each have to set themselves apart, and this one does it by being ultra-gross. Normally, that would make me judge it pretty harshly, but surprisingly, the clever writing and acting in this splatter flick does just as much to make it unique.

Super: B