Nobody, Netflix's Nezha Reborn & 13 new movies you can now watch at home polygon.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from polygon.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Photo: Hopper Stone / Netflix
There’s always been something faintly hilarious about superheroes, both the naked fantasy of abruptly gaining special abilities and becoming superior to everyone else, and the idea of celebrating that specialness by putting on a colorful, skintight suit and running around punching people. But pure superhero comedy has always been comparatively rare. Making fun of power fantasies undercuts them, and makes them less thrilling. And even full-on superhero comedies still generally have to come around to some kind of thrill or emotional catharsis in the end which usually means looping back to a straightforward approach, and competing with the stories that are grapple with the exact same content without irony or amusement.
Mick LaSalle April 9, 2021
Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer in the comedy “Thunder Force.” Photo: Hopper Stone, Associated Press
The strengths and the weaknesses of “Thunder Force” are apparent from its first minutes: The strengths are Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer. The weaknesses are emotional phoniness and a tendency toward sentimentality.
Still, the new Netflix comedy, out Friday, April 9, has a decent share of laughs and a shrewd science fiction premise behind it.
Apparently, some cosmic event caused a superhero gene to be let loose on Earth, but and this is the interesting part it remained dormant in the vast majority of people. The gene expressed itself only within sociopaths, so as the movie begins, there are sociopathic “superheroes,” or “miscreants” as they’re called here, walking the Earth and doing terrible things with impunity.