It’s appropriate that Robert Hays makes a brief appearance in Superhero Movie as its spider-manque protagonist’s father, because Craig Mazin’s film aspires to be a junior Airplane! – a sustained, plot-driven spoof that affectionately kids the conventions of a particular genre. It’s thus a different animal from the hateful (and movie-hating) crap peddled by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer of Date Movie and Epic Movie fame.  Of course, Superhero Movie never comes close the heights of Airplane! (or The Naked Gun, invoked both in the casting of Leslie Nielsen and a climactic flying-wheelchair gag), but nor does it plumb the depths of Meet the Spartans — which is to say that it’s nowhere near the worst film of the year.

But for the first 20 minutes or so, it seems like Superhero Movie will transcend such relativist thinking altogether. The opening credits build to a laugh-out-loud sight gag, and the scenes that kid the set-up of Spider-Man are peppered with some solid non-sequiturs. Asked if he’s OK after hawking some blood into his handkerchief, critically ill villain Christopher MacDonald deadpans “Yes, that’s good cough-blood.” MacDonald takes the Willem Dafoe role of the brilliant scientist who will be turned evil by his own medical breakthrough, while Drake Bell does a mean Tobey Maguire as the Peter Parker type who gets bitten by a radioactive dragonfly — but not before getting humped half-to-death by some pheromone-crazed lab animals (complete with lascivious snail subtitles). He returns home to a lecture from his aged uncle (Nielsen) about the difficulties of puberty; reading to his nephew from a medical textbook, Nielsen affects his best Frank Drebin deadpan and warns him that he may start bleeding from his vagina any day now.

The good spirits don’t quite last, though. While Superhero Movie is to be congratulated for mostly eschewing the pop-cultural trainspotting of the Seltzer/Friedberg school (excepting a limp Tom Cruise jibe), the absence of objectionably bad material doesn’t quite equal a preponderance of good stuff. Mazin leans harder on scatology as the film progresses and the Naked Gun-style climax — a humanitarian benefit reduced to violent shambles (with Nelson Mandela punking Desmond Tutu!) — smacks of desperation rather than invention. But it’s hard to hate a movie that gives us a bald-pated Tracy Morgan doing a halting variation on Patrick Stewart’s stentorian Prof. Xavier shtick — followed inevitable reveal of his bald, wheelchair-bound family. The shot is only grudgingly funny — but it’s funny all the same.


    

 

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