Just Super 2022

I’ve been waffling on where to direct my superhero movie watching now that I’ve caught up with all of the MCU and DC home streaming releases so I was just scrolling on my Disney+ watchlist to see what’s the shortest movie I had on my list for a nice quick and easy watch. I still have some of the Sony Marvel movies and the Toxic Avenger, but then I saw that I had this movie tucked away on my list and it was only an hour and fifteen minutes long so I decided to go with it. Based on the poster, it looked like one of those extremely low budget animated movies that are often marketed as a mockbuster to fool grandparents into thinking they’re buying Finding Nemo or Ratatouille but end up with Ratatoing, though this doesn’t feel like it’s ripping off any specific superhero movie, just jumping on the superhero trend in general. It’s also originally a Norwegian film that was dubbed into English though all the names are actually kept the same rather than being localized so we get the main characters Hedvig and Leif who are a part of a superhero heritage similar to the Phantom only here it’s Super Lion. As it is a family movie it has the overarching message about being yourself rather than trying to be something you’re not but as a film it wasn’t all that entertaining.

The movie is based around this small town who has had their own superhero for generations upon generations called Super Lion, a superhero who gets their powers from this super suit that enhances a person’s strengths to super levels. The current generation’s hero is Leif who has typical super strength and agility and the only one who knows his secret identity is his mother who is in a nursing home and was the previous Super Lion and his daughter Hedvig who doesn’t appear to have anything significantly special about her physically or mentally. She’s not good in gym or in her classes, the only thing that she seems to have any talent in is the video games that she streams with her friend online to their 4 followers, but her father Leif has no interest in supporting her love for video games at all and thinks they are just a waste of time.

What sets off the events of the movie is that Leif yells at Hedvig to stop playing video games and do her chores which is laundry, but the super lion suit gets accidentally knocked in with the rest of the clothes and gets shrunk to Hedvig size. And since that is the one and only suit, the only option is to retire Super Lion as a hero since Hedvig has no chance at ever becoming a superhero, at least according to her father. There is a lot of time spent showing how Leif is not a very supportive father, he has very little faith in his daughter as she doesn’t follow in any of his physically impressive footsteps and he has zero time for her interests. Meanwhile the mother was the more supportive parent for Hedvig but she has passed away. There’s also Hedvig’s cousin Adrian who excels at school, music, and is strong and agile but is also a brat and a bully towards Hedvig. In fact, her teacher is also portrayed as a bully towards Hedvig as she has no faith in Hedvig’s abilities at all, she’s portrayed as comic relief but as a parent she just comes off as very frustrating.

In fact, pretty much everyone at some point is very frustrating as this is a movie that feels like it’s about a character finding the thing that makes them special. Hedvig’s first trip out with the suit has her practically begging her father for some actual training, but instead he insists on taking her directly out into the field on a supposedly easy mission to capture an escaped Lemur, and when she fails at that mission he immediately gives up on her. And yet, when he transitions to training her cousin Adrian he spends a large amount of time with him in training in direct opposition to what he did with Hedvig. Meanwhile, Hedvig is secretly training with her grandmother and while they are trying to find what skill she has that the suit will enhance, they go through an exhaustive list without finding anything until they hit upon her gaming and it’s revealed that the suit gives her predictive powers which she does use on her one successful mission stopping a runaway train which was also a rematch with the escaped lemur.

The whole movie was just very frustrating to watch as all of the characters kept making bad decisions even through to the very end when there is a giant rock at the top of a mountain that is about to break free and fall directly into the town. Leif uses this opportunity to finally take Adrian out of training and into action while the bratty Adrian uses this to promote his real identity as the new Super Lion and punches a carving of his face in a boulder directly below the cracking hilltop. While Hedvig reconciles with her gaming friend who she had been neglecting during her secret training with her grandmother and the two of them use gaming physics to redirect the falling hilltop away from the town without using the super suit and then lets it blow away into the mountains, forever retiring Super Lion and accepting her own fate as just being herself while convincing her father Leif to just be her father. It’s a sweet, if simplistic message to the movie but as a whole it was very unsatisfying with too many unlikable characters and very little humor. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.