Archenemy is a new superhero movie. Or is it? Adam Egypt Mortimer‘s latest feature is a stylish hybrid of a scuzzy crime thriller and superheroics, with a gruff leathery Joe Manganiello as the face of its allegedly otherworldly avenger. But after establishing an intriguing premise and promising start, the director only manages to undermine the film’s potential.
Mortimer’s most recent film was the mind-parasite horror film Daniel Isn’t Real, a nightmare anchored by a menacing Patrick Schwarzenegger. Archenemy is just as visually-striking, and similarly carried by its central performance. Manganiello exudes a nerve-frazzled lit-fuse frustration as the superman of another world, dropped powerless on our Earth through the dimensional shenanigans of his nemesis. A man boiling with resentment towards his fall from ultimate hero to forgotten nobody…or so he says. To young blogger Hamster (Skylan Brooks), to the rest of the city, to the annoyed bar regulars, Manganiello’s Max Fist is just a homeless schizophrenic drowning in booze ranting about “cosmic blood” and dimension-fracturing technology and hovering next to black holes like a god. It’s a committed performance that juggles those two possibilities with volatile rage, supporting those fantastical voice-overs through vibrant motion-comic segments and an explosive physicality.
That rage draws Manganiello’s cosmic castaway into the troubles of Hamster and his sister Indigo (Zolee Griggs), whose lives rest in the controlling kingpin shadow of “The Manager” (Glen Howerton). There’s a thematic kernel buried somewhere, briefly glinting amid Indigo pushing drugs to escape their hardships, through Hamster’s desire to document the city’s crime and corruption. Brooks and Griggs do the best they can with shallow material, leaving an impression through their charisma and confusion. Ultimately, the duo’s struggles are reduced to a barebones framing device for bloody vigilante action and sadistically colorful crooks. When Archenemy explodes into violence, the results are slick with slow motion and blood. There’s a jarring weight and immediacy to the action, although that comes more from Manganiello’s wild-eyed intensity than from the choppy pacing. A crystal-meth-fueled one-man-army assault on a drug den – Max in full body armor shooting and smashing his way through goons – might as well be a secret audition reel for a Punisher reboot.
But soon, like the rest of the story, the intense crime action is swallowed by the director’s insistence on cosmic-hero nonsense. Rather than ambiguous hints, the script is a bombardment of mad-science Mad Libs and textbook super-hero tropes: not an ounce of subtlety when instead the film can hammer the screen with more comic panels and Manganiello freak-outs about his scheming nemesis. For all its flashy imagery, the movie can only deliver a safe conclusion and sterile attempt at emotional pay-off. In the end, one might question how to categorize Archenemy: scant action for an action movie, not enough time spent on its characters to work as a crime drama, not enough ambiguity or ramifications to fully explore its superhero sci-fi concept. The end result is a film that, despite a committed central performance, never commits to its clever premise.
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