The Class of 1999: 'Mystery Men'
The Class of 1999: 'Mystery Men'
This superhero satire was way ahead of its time.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversary. I recently re-reviewed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and was meant to do Eyes Wide Shut next… but honestly, Kubrick’s final masterpiece is so dense, trying to write about it is kicking my butt and putting me behind schedule on this retrospective! So we’re gonna skip ahead this week and circle back around to Eyes Wide Shut later. So: next up is The Iron Giant… but first… it’s time for…
Mystery Men - directed by Kinka Usher - written by Neil Cuthbert - July 22, 1999
Mystery Men, the only film ever made by commercial director Kinka Usher, was inarguably ahead of its time.
Based on characters from Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot Comics, Mystery Men is a superhero satire released during what wound up being a transitional period in Hollywood’s relationship to that sort of material. Outside of 1998’s Blade, Marvel characters had spent the decade relegated to animated television and straight-to-video hell. Warner Bros., which owns DC Comics, had made what were, at that point, the two most successful superhero movies ever… but that had been a decade or more prior (i.e., 1978’s Superman and 1989’s Batman). At this particular point in history, they’d seemingly killed their golden goose with 1997’s one-two punch of Batman & Robin and Steel; they couldn’t seem to get a new Superman movie off the ground (pardon the pun), and had no intention at that point of doing anything with their other most famous characters, like Wonder Woman and the Flash. The post-Batman comic boom had inexplicably focused on pulp heroes like Dick Tracy, The Shadow, and The Phantom, and yielded no real successes. The first X-Men movie was still a year away, and the first Spider-Man movie was still three years away.
Point being, while the concept of a “superhero” was certainly already part of the pop culture lexicon in 1999, they were not the monolithic juggernaut they are at present. And the idea of a superhero team, like the Avengers or the Justice League, was completely alien to most people. The tropes parodied in this movie were meaningless to general audiences.
And so, despite having a ridiculously-stacked cast that includes (deep breath) Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, William H. Macy, Hank Azaria, Paul Reubens, Geoffrey Rush, Greg Kinnear, Eddie Izzard, Tom Waits, Ricky Jay, Lena Olin, Kel Mitchell, Claire Forlani, Louise Lasser, Artie Lange, American goddamn treasure Wes Studi, and frickin’ Pras from the Fugees, Mystery Men was a big fat bomb that everyone save for a handful of dorks (including me! [pats self on back]) agreed was terrible.
But Mystery Men isn’t terrible.
Mystery Men is very, very, very funny.
Set in a reality where superheroes are accepted as a normality, Mystery Men’s titular characters are a team of amateur crimefighters who battle evil in Champion City. Initially, the team consists of the Shoveler (Macy), who dresses like a miner and fights bad guys with - you guessed it! - a shovel; the Blue Raja (Azaria), who exclusively wears green and throws forks at villains (he refuses to use knives); and Mr. Furious (Stiller), who gets really, really angry, which is supposed to result in super-strength, but actually results in… uh… nothing much. He’s all bluster, does not seem to have any actual superpowers, and is constantly having his ass handed to him.
The Mystery Men, like Rodney Dangerfield, can’t get no respect. This is in part because they’re so incredibly lousy at being superheroes, but mostly because Champion City doesn’t even need them: it’s protected by the seemingly unbeatable Captain Amazing (Kinnear), a kind of all-American, square-jawed savior in the same vein as Superman and Captain America.
That’s a total drag for the Mystery Men, who are kind of like a band that can’t get signed; they work shitty day jobs and constantly have to try and get people to take them seriously.
But it’s also a problem for Captain Amazing: he’s done such a good job of cleaning up crime in Champion City that he’s rendered himself useless, which means he’s starting to lose the corporate sponsors who pay him (his costume is covered with patches of those sponsors’ logos, as though he were a NASCAR driver; these include Pepsi, Reebok, Pennzoil, Rayovac, and, most amusingly of all, Shofar Kosher Foods).
Thus, Captain Amazing comes up with a scheme to put himself back in the spotlight: as his alter ego, billionaire Lance Hunt, he successfully argues for Casanova Frankenstein (Rush), a German, disco-obsessed supervillain who wields a deadly coke nail, to be released from the insane asylum. This is meant to ensure that Captain Amazing will soon have a real challenge to face once again.
Alas, it’s too good of a challenge: Casanova Frankenstein traps Captain Amazing with very little trouble.
And so the Mystery Men decide to step up and save the day by freeing Captain Amazing. They hold auditions for new teammates, ultimately settling on Bowler (Garofalo), who wields a bowling ball inhabited by the vengeful spirit (and literal skull) of her late father, with whom she frequently bickers (no one else can hear him); Invisible Boy (Mitchell), who has been so ignored by his family that he has come to believe he can make himself transparent… so long as no one is looking; and Spleen (Reubens), who produces flatulence of such malodorousness as to induce fainting in all who smell it.
The newly-expanded Mystery Men rush into battle with Casanova Frankenstein and his gang, which includes Leek (Olin), Tony P. (Izzard), and Tony C. (Pras)… and promptly get their asses kicked, only escaping with their lives thanks to the intervention of the “terribly mysterious” Sphinx (Studi).
Sphinx speaks exclusively in pithy statements, all of which, Mr. Furious points out, utilize the same inversion formula (e.g., “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions,” “When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you,” “Until you learn to master your rage, your rage will become your master,” etc.). Still, everyone who isn’t Mr. Furious elects Sphinx as their new leader. This naturally rubs Furious the wrong way, and he quits.
The now Furious-less Mystery Men go to get some fancy new non-lethal weapons from mad scientist, Doc Heller (Waits), including the Blame Thrower, which causes arguments amongst allies, and a gun that utilizes “simple dry-cleaning technology” to make people’s clothing shrink to a painful degree.
Furious, meanwhile, goes to the local diner at which he and the other Mystery Men usually eat, where he drinks coffee and broods. Monica (Forlani), the waitress for whom he has the hots but is too cowardly to ask out, encourages him to go back to the Mystery Men.
Thus, Mr. Furious returns to the team just as they make their bid to save Captain Amazing. They successfully infiltrate Casanova Frankenstein’s castle; there, they find the villain conveniently explaining his evil plan - to use a weapon called the “psychofrakulator” to destroy Champion City at midnight - to a cadre of other gangs. Among these gangs are the Frat Boys, led by uber-macho action director Michael Bay; the Susies, whose ranks include future Fast and Furious franchise star Sung Kang; and the hip-hop group Goodie Mob, appearing as the Not-So-Goodie Mob.
The Mystery Men manage to locate Captain Amazing, strapped into a chair directly beneath the psychofrakulator (a classic superhero death trap). Tragically, the Mystery Men are idiots: in the process of trying to free Captain Amazing, they accidentally trigger the weapon, thereby killing him (oopsy).
The Mystery Men retreat, and even consider going on the lam - but the Shoveler convinces them to mount one final campaign against Casanova Frankenstein. Assuming they will not survive the mission, they all take some time to say farewell to their loved ones before this ultimate assault.
Furious goes to see Monica, who encourages him to stop trying to be some projection of the ideal superhero and start being himself… after which she’s kidnapped by Casanova Frankenstein.
This turn of events conveniently provides Mr. Furious with the rage he needs to truly earn his title. He kills Casanova Frankenstein and the Mystery Men destroy the psychodefrakulator, thereby finally earning the city’s appreciation.
It is entirely possible to enjoy Mystery Men as nothing more than a silly, silly superhero farce. Visually, Usher mostly riffs on the hyper-stylized Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher era of Batman (leaning more heavily on the Schumacher stuff), which makes sense, given that they were the dominant comic book movies of the preceding decade. The themed gangs, likewise, are a nod to the deliberately campy 1966 Batman television show.
But in terms of narrative, it’s mostly stuff that, again, people unfamiliar with comic books as a medium would not get, like Furious utilizing classic comic-speak (“Temperature rising… vision blurring… rage… taking… over!”) and Blue Raja’s unwillingness to use lethal force (a superhero trope with which Hollywood still struggles. The large-scale audience a movie with a $70 million budget needs didn’t really exist yet. But almost two decades later, Deadpool would recruit allies with actor-style headshots and auditions, just like the Mystery Men did…
…and Amazon would adapt Garth Ennis’ The Boys, the primary antagonist of which, Homelander (Anthony Starr), is a direct descendent of Captain Amazing.
But Mystery Men is more than just a droll caricature that was too far ahead of the curve for its own good.
Like so many of 1999’s great films, it’s also about class and identity.
To the point of class: Captain Amazing is a billionaire with corporate ties, while the Mystery Men are decidedly blue-collar and indie (the Bowler even gives a shout-out to indie music and indie films in a news interview after they defeat Casanova Frankenstein). Mystery Men is unmistakably an underdog story about how heart matters more than resources.
Insofar as issues of identity go: the Mystery Men’s philosophy at the start of the film is ostensibly “fake it ‘til you make it,” and they all have arcs that pertain, in some way, to being their authentic selves. Mr. Furious finds his inner hero after Monica advises him to drop his invulnerable tough guy act; the Shoveler, who has been an amateur for twelve years, proves to his wife and kids that he’s a real superhero; Blue Raja ostensibly comes out to his mother (Lasser); Bowler, having avenged her father’s murder, gets to go back to grad school (“That was the agreement!”); Invisible Boy proves that he really can turn invisible; and Spleen, whose powers are a curse from a Romani woman on whom he tried to blame his cheese-cutting, finds his courage. The villains, meanwhile, are stuck in the ‘70s disco era; they reject introspection and evolution.
Mystery Men is also a feat of dramatic engineering: it has a substantial cast of characters, and it somehow manages to satisfyingly service all of them (well…maybe not Olin and Forlani). The heroes are all distinct and have just enough of an inner emotional life to make us like and care about them, and they all have their own arc! It’s not Nashville, exactly, but it’s still no small fear. In fact, we know how hard it is to pull this off because we’ve seen filmmakers fail to do so in other team movies (looking at you, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) and superhero films (the theatrical version of Justice League and the 2015 iteration of Fantastic Four both come to mind, but even Joss Whedon’s two Avengers movies struggled to give every member of their substantial ensembles something to do). And this despite the fact that although Mystery Men’s screenplay is credited to Neil Cuthbert (Hocus Pocus), apparently Usher and the cast did tons and tons of on-the-fly rewriting. Which is even more embarrassing for those other films, because they had locked scripts - Mystery Men, in other words, achieved more with less preparation.
This all really speaks to Usher’s talent as a director: not just any old schmuck could have wrangled this unwieldy production into something that’s as coherent and just plain good as Mystery Men. Which makes it all the more disappointing that he never made another movie (although we shouldn’t feel too bad for him - he’s still very successful and rich AF). Hopefully, he takes some pride in knowing that he was so far out ahead of the pack.