Review of Special (1967) by Joshua S — 18 Mar 2010

This inventive but anti-climactic low-budget indie psychodrama â??Special (RX) Specioprin Hydrochlorideâ?? depicts the psychotic delusions that a shy young guy suffers from after he participates in clandestine drug testing program. â??True Romanceâ?? star Michael Rapaport excels as deranged protagonist Les Franken, and Rapaportâ??s performance testifies to his genius as an actor that he can forge a genuinely sympathetic character who could easily have been portrayed as a shallow lunatic. Unfortunately, freshman co-scenarists & directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore fail to develop their screenplay past its provocative premise. Happily, they shun the low road which would have made â??Specialâ?? into a lame-brained, predicable comedy. Instead, they play everything extremely straight and narrow so this satirical character study of a pathetic man becomes a parable about paranoia. The subtlety with which they handle the action in the early stages makes â??Specialâ?? appear promising, but the luster grows tarnished about an hour into this 81-minute epic.

Les Franken is an anonymous meter cop for the Los Angeles Police Department. He writes parking citations during the day. Once he starts writing a ticket, he claims that he cannot stop the process. Nevertheless, when a woman gives him a sob story about her bankruptcy, Les breaks the rule and tears up the ticket. Later, Lesâ?? boss chews him out for having such a soft heart. Our modest but unassuming hero lives alone and has no friends other than two geeks who own a comic book store. Les worries that he is too old to be reading comic books, but these simple-minded sagas fuel his avid fantasies. It isnâ??t long after he ingests the medication that its side effects kick in and his life takes some dramatic turns. While eating cereal on his sofa and watching television, Les levitates in the air. Mind you, he doesnâ??t rise very high off the cushions, but he ascends high enough to blow his mind. Suddenly, Les imagines that the pills have unlocked his latent superhero powers. Actually, Dr. Dobson (Jack Kehler of â??The Big Lebowskiâ??) explains that Les is on a new experimental antidepressant which "inhibits the brain chemical responsible for self-doubt.".

Initially, Haberman and Passmore let our hero imagine that he is a super hero who can leap off a desk and hover above the floor. Indeed, weâ??the audienceâ??buy into Lesâ?? delusion because we see it from his perspective. At first, â??Specialâ?? is a lot of fun because we want to believe what Les believes, but Haberman and Passmore evoke our suspicions that Les is not only fooling himself but us, too. The co-directors let Les get away with a couple of things amid all the other things that he doesnâ??t get away with. When Les runs through a wall, he vanishes into the wall. Afterward, however, he reappears with bruises and blood stains on his head. Haberman and Passmore seem intent of confusing us about the reality and illusion of Lesâ?? delusions. Dr. Dobson wants to administer an antidote, but Les feels that it will divest him of his super powers.

Believe it or not, Les insists he is indestructible. Our deluded protagonist starts cruising town in a goofy â??Specialâ?? super hero outfit with the name of the drug manufacturer on his back. Les looks like a mental patient on the loose. He tackles people in stores who he mistakes as shoplifters. These misguided stunts win him a segment on the local newscast. The scene where he tries to turn himself in at the LAPD is hilarious. Les thinks that he can read the minds of those people around him. Basically, everything that Les does backfires on him, except on two occasions. He saves a supermarket clerk from a gunman and recovers a womanâ??s purse from a thief. Eventually, the financial backers of the pharmaceutical company that invented the medication, the Exiler Brothers, Jonas (Blackthorne) and Ted (Ian Bohen), try to kill him because his hallucinatory behavior will discredit them. Les calls them â??the suitsâ?? and they become his arch-enemies. At one point, they use their dark, sinister automobile as a battering ram to run over him not once but twice!

The redeeming thing about â??Specialâ?? is that there are probably people out there like Les who might imitate his behavior under similar circumstances. Sadly, â??Specialâ?? emerges as a little less than special because Haberman and Passmore dream up subplots and then dump them. The possibility of a romance between Les and a supermarket cashier with her own problems fails to materialize. One wonders whether Haberman and Passmore realized that they were channeling a combo of the 1968 Cliff Robertson movie â??Charly,â?? based on the novel â??Flowers for Algernonâ?? as well as M. Night Shyamalanâ??s â??Unbreakable.â?? Instead, Passmore has stated that the movie â??Jackassâ?? inspired him. Unmistakably, â??Specialâ?? deconstructs the way the media and our culture affect certain types of impressionable individuals.