Review of With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story (2010) by Bob D — 02 May 2012

Saw this at iPic theater in Scottsdale, AZ last night with my family. I was embarrassed for having invited them. The resolution of the film alone was enough to give this movie a poor rating - my PHONE takes better resolution video - but that was, perhaps, the theater's fault.

However, what really clinched the poor rating for me was the film itself was basically just a series of irritatingly HUGE pans across headlines from websites and newspapers with music playing in the background. There were also several zooms on text bubbles (like you'd see in comic books, so that made some sense), but the zoom in was so tight and huge that I couldn't read them before they popped off the screen again. Imagine this sentence appearing in a text bubble that is ten feet high and fifteen feet wide and then imagine trying to swing your head back and forth quickly enough to read all of this in about five seconds.

After that, the "film" is basically a conglomeration of tight, close-up interviews of Mr. Lee, his wife, and a few of his previous coworkers. And, many clips of television interviews and news reports.

Interestingly, the stream of material and even the script appeared to follow almost to the letter the "Stan Lee" entry in Wikipedia. (Or, perhaps, the Wikipedia entry follows the film. Chicken or egg...?) So, having read the Wikipedia entry just hours before seeing the film, I felt like I was watching the result of someone's web search for "Stan Lee"-related stuff. As a matter of fact, because of the ridiculous zoom ins and piss-poor resolution, I kept saying to myself that I could've gotten the same info and had a better time if I'd simply stayed at home and done the web search myself.

If the topic of the film was not "Stan Lee", I would've given this half a star instead of one star.

Totally disappointing. Absolutely NOT worth the $11/ticket I paid.