The Parody Before There Was Really Anything to Parody

The history of cinema is littered with films that were ahead of their time, films where audiences didn’t understand what the movie was going for. You can see this with some cult classics that are absolutely classics of cinema, like The Thing, Fight Club, and Blade Runner. These are movies people will hold and go, “yes, this film is amazing,” and yet when you go and look at the Box Office numbers it’s hard to deny that, at best, they underperformed and, at worst, they flopped. Audiences didn’t get them, frequently critics didn’t get them, and the films were forced to find their audiences on cable and home video instead.

While I don’t think Mystery Men is a classic of cinema that you’d normally talk about in the same breath as, say, The Shawshank Redemption (another absolute banger that, somehow, only did tepid returns at the Box Office), it does share one thing with all the other films I’ve mentioned: it was way ahead of its time and only really found its audience after it left theaters. In this case, Mystery Men was predicting an era of superhero films that hadn’t yet come to be. In fact, it was parodying it before there was really anything to parody. It does a phenomenal job, but there was just one problem: superhero movies weren’t yet culturally relevant enough for people to think they were ripe for parody.

At the time Mystery Men came out, in 1999, the superhero genre was really dominated by two cinematic takes: Superman and its sequels and then Batman and its sequels. And make no mistake, Mystery Men is a fantastic roasting of the latter Batman movies, Batman and Forever and Batman & Robin. It came out two years after the fourth Batman movie and it rightly mocks its style, its substance, its design… just about everything. But audiences hated Batman & Robin and they weren’t looking for a parody of just that film. Blade had just come out and it showed a different kind of superhero. Plus, we were still a year out from X-Men and three years out from Spider-man. It would take a good seventeen years for audiences to truly be ready for a parody of the genre, and that came in the form of Deadpool. Mystery Men fell at the wrong time.

Which is a real pity because with every passing year Mystery Men becomes more and more prescient. It understood the inherent silliness of the genre, and instead of trying to ignore it or pretend superheroes weren’t silly (like dressing them up in black leather instead of their colorful costumes), the film doubles down. It also predicted that superhero team-ups would work in cinema, at a time when those kinds of movies weren’t being made. It understood that you didn’t have to have A-list stars to make a successful superhero team (something Marvel would prove with the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.). It knew where the superhero genre would go… it just got there a decade too early. But hey, it did it with style.

Mystery Men is focused on a trio of wannabe superheroes: Ben Stiller as Roy / Mr. Furious, a man who derives his power from his boundless rage; Hank Azaria as Jeffery / Blue Raja, the master of cutlery who hurls forks with precision; and William H. Macy as Eddie / Shoveler, a man who wields a shovel with amazing aplomb. These three have been trying to make a name for themselves as a team, but at every turn they find their heroics stopped by Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), Champion City's greatest superhero. They want to be the big guys, but they have no way of making it.

As it turns out, though, they aren’t the only ones disappointed with their lot. Captain Amazing, real name Lance, is also upset. He’s just lost his Pepsi endorsement, and he feels like he’s not getting to do the kind of superheroics he should be doing. That’s why he hatches a plan to unleash one of his greatest foes, mad genius Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush). The plan backfires, though, when Frankie easily dupes Amazing, knocking him out and imprisoning him in Casa de Casanova’s basement. That’s where our rag-tag team has to step in. Without the big hero around, Our three guys have to recruit a full team so they can find a way into the Casanova stronghold and, if possible, save Amazing. But things are never as easy as they seem…

Mystery Men isn’t a superhero film in the same league as Superman or Batman, and that was by choice. These aren’t your normal heroes, they’re the other guys. They’re street-level vigilantes (before The Defenders made it to NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it).) just trying to get by and do a little good. They aren’t heroes like we were used to seeing in 1999, and that’s part of their charm. Three dorks with a shovel, a set of forks, and a pathetic amount of rage aren’t the kind of heroes you’d expect to win the day, and the film finds a lot of humor in that.

Going back and watching the trailer for the film, it’s easy to see why the film flopped. The trailer does a very bad job of selling what the film is about. It plays the superheroics far more straight than they actually play out in the full movie, and what humor is showcased in the trailer is probably some of the worst, most obvious jokes from the film. If you were to be assigned to make the worst trailer for Mystery Men that you could, I don’t think you could have done much worse than the one that Universal actually put out.

Missing is a lot of the team dynamics that make the film amusing. It’s not just the patter being the main trio, but the colorful heroes they bring onto the team as well: Kel Mitchell as Invisible Boy, who can only be invisible when no one is watching; Paul Reubens as Spleen, the master of flatulence; Janeane Garofalo as Carol / Bowler, who fights crime with a haunted bowling ball that contains the skull of her dead father; and the terribly mysterious Sphinx, played by Wes Studi. These guys biker back and forth, mining so much humor from the stupidity of their characters, their world, and their own flawed interpersonal dynamics.

The film also works as a parody of superhero films up to that point (and, without knowing it, beyond). From the set design, to the costumes, to the musical cues, you could easily see these heroes existing in the same world as Batman & Robin. Hell, that film was almost self-parody when it came out, and Mystery Men just says, “yeah, that was silly. Let’s own it.” It’s funny because it knows that this whole setting is weird and dumb, so it might as well find the comedy in it.

But at the same time, it’s a parody that honestly knows what it’s doing. It still has to be a superhero film, so it manages to layer a whole string of jokes, gags, and set-pieces all while still treating its superheroes like people. They have a quest, they go on an adventure, and they get a little more heroic in the process. They do the job no one else can do, being real superheroes all while the film finds the funny. Hell, I’d say it does an even better job of it than the humor inserted into the MCU films as there the movies sometimes feel like they’re straining to tell a joke while here solid, well trained comedians are doing what they do best while also being superheroes. It’s a delicate balance, and Mystery Men nails it.

So yes, I understand why the film failed, but I just as easily get why it then found its audience afterwards. Hell, it continues to find new fans as the superhero genre marches on and everything Mystery Men did feels even more predictive. This was a film far ahead of its time, but because of that it’s aged like fine wine. It’s a parody that only improves as the years, and the genre, carry on.