Superhero Movie

Kicking bottom-feeding dross like ‘Superhero Movie’ is like shooting fish in a barrel, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. What’s most dispiriting is how far the once relatively respectable genre of the spoof movie has plummeted from the days of ‘Airplane!’, ‘The Naked Gun’ and Leslie Nielsen, who features here . The ‘plot’ is essentially ‘Spider-Man’, but draws in elements from ‘X-Men’ and ‘Superman’: films already perfectly aware of their own absurdity. More welcome would have been a riff on Chris Nolan’s po-faced ‘Batman’ reboot, but no such luck.

It’s nice to see old lags like Robert Hays and Keith David still pulling down a paycheck, but at what cost? Any reader who spurns advice and finds him or herself bemoaning the waste of 85 perfectly good minutes should spare a thought for the poor saps who squandered months making the thing.