5) Mystery Men
With a lineup and set-up that appear so promising on paper, it might be a little hard to understand quite how Mystery Men managed to fade so quietly into cinematic obscurity without so much as a hint of kicking and screaming. Despite its star-studded cast and plot potential, the movie opened to a watery reception and box office failure, eventually crawling indiscernibly into the world of forgotten films, taking its director Kinka Usher with it.
Loosely based on Bob Burden’s silly superhero parody Flaming Carrot Comics, Mystery Men lines up Ben Stiller as the red-faced Mr. Furious, Hank Azaria as a pseudo-genie who flings cutlery with aplomb, William H. Macy as a workman who tries to channel his shovel-skills into crime-fighting, and Kel Mitchell as the invisible boy who can only vanish when nobody looks at him. Alas, this plethora of lurid, stupid superheroes weren’t enough to capture the public’s imagination, and Mystery Men proved to be about as successful as its own inept, parody characters are at battling crooks.
The movie isn’t exactly awful, either. It’s a patchy, campy, spoofy satire on superhero films that probably fell victim to the fact that some of the genuine superhero films of the decade – namely Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies – were effectively spoofs in themselves. As movies go, it’s a middling experience.
Ultimately though, it’s the middle-of-the-road movies that are so often shuffled to the back of your mental movie shelf, whilst the great and the awful sit prominently side-by-side at the forefront. In the superhero section, Mystery Men finds itself cluttered away somewhere in the dark; with its tittering humor and quirky charm impossible to hear over the ugly prowl of Catwoman and the mighty roar of The Dark Knight.
