Much less lighthearted than it initially appears, ultimately a very dark and realist tragicomedy about the kind of psychopath who might try to become a real-life superhero, and what really might happen. Ultimately kind of flawed, but it’s hard to dislike Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page no matter what kind of craziness they get up to.
For the first few scenes I really thought it was going to suck, the acting was just terrible and the characters paper-thin, and ridiculously clean-cut, preppie-looking character Russell supposed to be some sort of scary mad-dog psychopath.
And then something magic happened, and with every scene it got better and better, until by the end I was really impressed and really enjoyed it without reservation. I wouldn’t call it a great film, it’s definitely got its amateurish flaws, but I’d give it a very, very solid B+, way better than a lot of first time directors’ films.
This is an amazing cross between the kind of super-lo-budget indie horror older folks like me tend to think of as “USA Up All Night” flicks—let’s face it, the actors uniformly suck, and Russell in particular, is horribly miscast, supposed to be a murderous psycho but seeming more like an overacting college kid, which he probably was—and a really well-executed, smartly written neo-noir/genre flick.
This film wears its influences on its sleeve, although the long shadow of Quentin Tarantino is an interesting thing to see fairly successfuly integrated into what is basically a horror thriller. To spell out all the obvious influences would be to give away too much of the plot, which is nowhere near as straightforward as it initiially appears its going to be, but this film is sort of a cross between the wave of tarantino-influenced neo-noir (“Sexy Beast” also springs to mind for some reason, probably the gritty realism, which this film apes only cartoonishly) and some offbeat & interesting horror movies I could name with plots that revolve around loopiness in time.