It’s why Flash Gordon is such great camp. BRIAN BLESSED and Max von Sydow chewing the scenery gloriously, everyone else, especially Sam Jones and Melody Anderson (Flash and Dale) playing it so earnestly. Meanwhile, IIRC, the scriptwriter was totally going for a fun, campy, pulpy story based on the source material.

“Miiike! MIIIIKE!!! MIIIIIKE!!!!”

I have to disagree about dismissing Mystery Men entirely as popcorn fare. For all its purely comedic beats, it understands modern superhero comics better than most of what we’ve had before, including the Superman and Batman franchises, which were still looking at outdated 1940s models. Whereas Mystery Men is set in a r…

If twice - a snippet during the action, and the whole song at the end - count as “all over”, then okay. I don’t mind it, but it doesn’t add to or subtract from the movie.

Ya, my attic. It looks great. Bought it at a Macy’s sale.

This story is amazing and I love it. (And yes this movie rules.)

totally. It’s the “Pow! Wham! Comics aren’t for kids anymore?” headline syndrome, that was all around in the 80's and 90's.

Honestly, that’s what elevates potential schlock. If everyone involved is involved, that sells it so much more. Cheeky winks to the camera ruin so many movies that don’t ask for it (i.e. Deadpool, founded on winks to the camera.)

Saying Shrek ruined All Star is a little like saying Human Centipede ruined eating poop.

Agreed completely. I never thought of the film as mocking superhero movies (which, as part of the superhero target audience of 12-year-olds at the time, I was barely even aware of) - I just thought of it as a great, silly comedy with an amazing cast (even the tertiary characters - Lena Olin? Louise Lasser?) within…

It’s got a ton of great, memorable lines (my favorite is probably when Mr. Furious finally gets fed up with the Sphinx’s inscrutable wisdom), but as a movie overall it’s still really shaggy and weird. I remember seeing this with my girlfriend and while I came out of it thinking I had seen something fairly interesting…

I can say with utter certainty that my wife and I saw Mystery Men at 12:30am the morning of August 11, 1999. She had to be at the hospital at 5:00am for a scheduled C-section and there was no way we were going to sleep that night, so we went to a post-midnight showing. The theater was rather empty but we had a great…

“My father died under mysterious circumstances.  He fell down an elevator shaft...onto some bullets.”

I think there’s one other reason that the spoofy-feeling ones predate a lot of the serious ones: it’s a lot easier and cheaper to film a Shoveler and a Blankman and an Orgazmo than it is a Mr. Fantastic or Spider-Man. So you get a some of the cachet of “super hero” without the expense associated with super heroes.

When Mystery Men works, it works so damn well that you overlook the bad parts. Whether it’s The Sphinx’s words of wisdom or the Captain Amazing rescue, I can’t help but get a smile on my face. It’s not the best movie, but it’s a damn sight better than it’s being given credit for in this review.

“Sorry, but am I to understand you’ve inserted your father’s skull inside of that ball for bowling?”

Totally. Eddie Izzard was a massive stand-up comedian. Geoffrey Rush was the Oscar winning actor from Shine. Greg Kinnear I knew from Talk Soup. William H. Macy- Fargo. And Tom Waits, though I wasn’t a fan at the time, I still knew who he was (Rain Dogs has since become one of my favourite albums). I would have known…

Spot on. And the fact that there are so many quotable lines, even by a reviewer who claims to dislike the film, means it did what it set out to do: Be a dumb but memorable popcorn flick making fun of superhero comics.

There’s painting of a young William H Macy in an attic somewhere.

Keep in mind: This movie is so deeply 1999 that its end-credits song is literally Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”