Year: 1983
Runtime: 96 min
Director: Philippe Mora
Starring: Alan Arkin, Christopher Lee, Kate Fitzpatrick, Michael Pate
Sometimes you watch a movie so ahead of its time, so revolutionary in concept, that you can only stop and wonder what might have happened if it had been given life a decade or two later. Actually, even two decades wouldn’t have been the right time for The Return of Captain Invincible. It would need to be released thirty years after its premiere to have any sort of chance in the film world. You see, it is a superhero parody, made when the only superhero films to exist were the first two Superman movies. It is also a musical.
Yup, a superhero comedy musical, with a couple songs from Richard O’Brien, that genius behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Oh, and it stars Alan Arkin and CHRISTOPHER LEE! And before you bother asking, of course Lee sings. It’s a musical, after all.
The plot of this wacky Australian farce (oh, right, it was also one of the larger budgeted Australian movies of its time and features cameos from a ton of Australian celebrities and comedians) sees our intrepid Legend in Leotards forced from his native soil during the McCarthy era, as he is accused of being a commie pinko. This turns the Superman-analogue to the bottle, and when the movie picks up, we find him drunk and in Australia. But when the evil Mr. Midnight steals a hypno ray (which does what it says on the tin), the president of the United States and a plucky Australian cop have to convince Captain Invincible to save the world one last time.
Basically, imagine an alcoholic Superman…but not like Hancock. God, not like Hancock.
Try to picture the ridiculously overpowered comic book character from the 1960s and less the charming Christopher Reeve creation of the 70s, and then make him a bumbling alcoholic who probably drinks goon by the gallon. Captain Invincible can’t control his powers, can’t even remember how to fly, and a lot of the early film is just comedic skits as they try to reeducate him in his own unearthly abilities. In one funny scene, it turns out that he’s been so drunk that he’s had no idea he’s been living in Australia all this time, believing it to be an unfamiliar part of New York City.
And this actually works as a pretty funny bit of parody. Superman—er, I mean Captain Invincible—is played as just enough of a shmuck by Arkin to be sympathetic, but not so much that he becomes pathetic and tiresome. He has a world-weary attitude that has been hammered into him by decades of neglect but manages to retain a bit of optimism, keeping him from becoming too jaded and allowing us to feel good rooting for him.
The movie also hails from a weird period in movie history when there was no PG-13 rating in the U.S. and so a film rated PG could have a brief topless scene and a song titled “Bullshit”.
And that is a great song by the way.
Actually, they’re all great. There are about nine of them scattered throughout, none of them very long, but all of them surprisingly pleasant to the ear. I’d never have guessed I’d enjoy Alan Arkin’s singing voice, but I challenge you to keep from humming along when he starts crooning about finding it hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. And when Christopher Lee starts dancing and singing to encourage our alcoholic hero to fall off the wagon? All other films wish they could have such a righteously awesome scene. With his rich baritone and energetic dance moves, he easily steals the scene and the whole dang movie. It’s a musical number well worth revisiting a time or two.
In fact, if the songs were a little longer, and there were a couple more of them, this would be a thoroughly modern musical. Unfortunately, it feels like the filmmakers got cold feet and tried to shuffle in as many different cards as they could, hoping one of them would magically be the one audiences would respond to (and judging from the film’s troubled editing process, this is fairly accurate). So this never fully commits to being a musical. Instead, it aims for a more broad label of “comedy”, and it mostly succeeds. A lot of the gags are funny, including a running shtick with Lee feeding his smaller pets to increasingly larger predators while monologuing, and there’s a lot of slapstick on display.
My only real complaints come from a messy series of vignettes once our heroes reach NYC. We have some particularly unimpressive jokes during this stretch, including a food fight that includes a machine gun swordfish. Fortunately, the pace picks up for the end, with some better gags (an endless corridor of unique pits being a highlight) and that A+ Christopher Lee musical number to send us off in style.
I will say that this isn’t exactly a family friendly movie. I noted earlier that there is a song whose sole lyric, repeated in every manner imaginable, is bullshit, but there’s also some naughty jokes that would be a tad inappropriate for the younger set, including a bunch of topless women in one brief scene, and the disappointing number of ways the movie tries to reduce Kate Fitzpatrick to a set of cleavage to ogle (even having her molested by a bunch of sentient vacuum cleaners at one point). This fluctuation in tone from kid-friendly to more risque is something that should have been ironed out before release, but instead it’s displayed front and center. It really makes me wonder just who the intended audience was for this film.
This was made before such material as Watchmen took apart the superhero genre and played with its conventions, but this movie does a little bit of that itself, though not in such an adult or drastic manner. Nowadays, the idea of poking fun at superheroes and comicbook movies is pretty easy to swallow, but back in 1983 it was a little more original. But who was going to watch this? The Superman movies were marketed towards kids and most of the other superhero content at the time was relegated to television, with shows like Batman, Wonder Woman, Shazaam, The Six Million Dollar Man, all of it directed toward kids, and that seems to be the idea here, but the themes of alcoholism and the Benny Hill type shenanigans seem to cancel out that notion. And that’s probably why the film was dead on arrival when it debuted.
The Return of Captain Invincible is one of those films that slipped through the cracks when it was released and gained a cult following for a reason. If you enjoyed The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Little Shop of Horrors, or especially Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, you’ll probably get a kick out of this movie, especially if you are also a Superman fan. This movie may lack the quantity when it comes to music, but the songs are catchy, the jokes mostly land, and the attitude is one of loving parody to a beloved and iconic character, though the name might have been changed to protect the innocent.
Also, Christopher Lee sings and dances with a bunch of minions clad in leather bondage gear.
Did I mention this movie is a little edgier than your average PG fare?
