Review of Defendor (2009) by Patrick E — 09 Jan 2011

By all accounts I should like this movie. I mean, it has a superhero, there are some definite parallels to Kick-Ass, my second favourite movie of 2010, and it seemed funny by what I saw in the trailer. By god I tried to like this, but I just didn't. Woody Harrelson is pretty much the only reason to see this movie and even with him its agressively mediocre. In fact, this is a lot like another so-called "feel good movie" called Pay It Forward. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it still isn't good.

First of all, it was kind of marketed as a comedy, but the subject matter was beyond depressing. The movie is about Arthur Poppington, a "slow" man who believes that he is a superhero. He wants to kill "Captain Industry", a fictional entity that he believes is real. Captain Industry is actually a person though, a sex trafficker who happens to be a corrupt cop. Arthur thinks he's the enemy because Arthur's mother was a prostitute and his grandfather says that it was the "Captains of Industry" that killed her. Arthur also meets Kat (Dennings) a young prostitute who helps him along his journey.

The subject matter could make for a good dark comedy or a kickin action film, but instead they tried to go the dramatic angle and it didn't work. It could have worked as a dark comedy or action film. I suppose it was meant to show that even a person who is mentally challenged can be a hero, but the message kind of got mixed up in all the emotionally manipulative stuff. All in all, the story could have worked, but I think I would have enjoyed it better had it been more like Kick-Ass, but maybe that's my age showing.

The acting, while it was okay, was not all that spectacular and to be honest, not that memorable. I never really cared for Woody Harrelson as an actor and Kat Dennings I never really cared for either. Don't get me wrong, they weren't horrible, they just weren't very good. In fact, nothing about this movie was horrible, it was just all mediocre. Don't get me wrong, the movie definitely has its moments, but there are just too few of them to make Defendor a good movie.

Defendor is by no means a horrible film, and I'm sure that there are some people out there who adore this movie. However, I'm not one of those people. The characters are annoying and unsympathetic, the movie is incredibly dull and emotionally manipulative, and its far from a feel good movie. It's far from the worst movie I have ever seen, but far from the best. The acting and story are average, and this is just an aggressively mediocre movie.