Mystery Men hit theaters at the tail end of a decade when the mainstream traded in its Brooks Brothers suit for second-hand flannel, grew a goatee, developed a trendy heroin habit and tried to convince a generation of famously apathetic grunged-up slackazoids that they were totally into Nirvana back when they were still on Sub Pop. It was a golden age for the co-option of hip subcultures as corporations adopted a series of rebellious poses to facilitate the all-important business of selling sullen young people crap they don't really need.
It was an era when Jeremy Davies legendarily argued that Subaru was "like punk rock, only it's a car". If Subaru is like punk rock, only a car then Mystery Men is like a funky little independent cult comedy only it's a giant, bloated, special effects-intensive, big-budget studio blockbuster.
I have a lot of affection for Mystery Men, which held up surprisingly well on my third viewing but it has some fairly huge liabilities. For starters it looks and feels more like Batman & Robin than any movie should. That of course includes Batman & Robin. Mystery Men looks more or less exactly like what it's spoofing, which either makes it more subversive or less. To me at least it seems terribly askew that an adaptation of a cult Dark Horse comic about second-rate superheroes is characterized by an almost blinding shininess. In my viewer's cut of Mystery Men director Kinka Usher would have been fired the minute his dailies betrayed a Schumacherian comic-book slickness and replaced by Jim Jarmusch or Terry Gilliam. Hey, a boy can dream, can't he? Mystery Men requires a sly, deadpan, minimalist sensibility instead of the campy excess of Usher's comic book-inspired direction, with its extreme angles and unflattering close-ups.
It somehow doesn't seem coincidental that both Michael Bay and Dane Cook have cameos in Mystery Men though Bay was sorely overlooked come Oscar time despite the passion and conviction he brought to his single line: "Dude, can we bring brewskis?". Then again Bay and Usher share a background in television commercials and Usher directs with an ad vet's obsessive need to make each individual image radiate as much iconic force as possible. Mystery Men is consequently an adaptation of an independent comic book that feels like it was directed by the kind of guy who'd throw Poindexters into lockers in high school for doing geeky things like reading independent comic books.