Escapism, But No Capes
Sky High superhero saga tweaks the genre but retains its fundamental respect
by Noel Murray
Shortly before the release of The Incredibles last year, legendary superhero cartoonist John Byrne announced that he wouldn't go see it. Byrne's an avowed admirer of Pixar and director Brad Bird, but he's also a stickler for the way his genre comes off in the mass media, and no matter how many people insisted that The Incredibles is respectful, Byrne was hung up on a scene in the trailer that made fun of capes. That's taking purity to an extreme, but Byrne's got a point. Even recent movies that "get superheroes right" don't fully trust the material. The cinematic X-Men wear leather jackets instead of form-fitting costumes, while the latest incarnations of Spider-Man and Batman pause once or twice to wink at the conventions of heroes and villains.
Sky High is all wink. The movie takes place at a school for fledgling superheroes, where Will Stronghold, son of heralded crimefighters The Commander and Jetstream, deals with the fact that he hasn't yet developed any powers. Michael Angarano plays Will, Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston play his folks, and director Mike Mitchell and his team of Disney Channel screenwriters paint the family drama broadly, with lots of jokes about the shame of being a mere "sidekick." Sky High doesn't have a lot of depth—there's none of The Incredibles' social commentary, or the genre-exploiting teen angst of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And Mitchell and company make some lazy choices, like filling the soundtrack with cover versions of '80s pop hits to keep the parents in the theater humming. In a summer full of multi-layered, tuned-to-the-now action-fantasies like War Of The Worlds and Star Wars Episode III, Sky High is thoroughly irrelevant.
It's also the most purely entertaining of the bunch. If I want to recall the mood of 2005 ten years from now, I'll watch Land of the Dead again. If I want to spend a pleasant afternoon with my kids, I'll pop in Sky High. There's nothing new in the way it tips over the high-school caste system or spoofs superhero conventions, but it features an agreeable enough collection of would-be teen idols from the Hollywood machine, and the movie on the whole is bright, clean, good-natured, and sturdily plotted—especially once Will goes through hero puberty and starts to power up. As he struggles to split time between his old sidekick friends and his new superhero friends, the movie deals with questions of loyalty and maturation without ever getting gross or overly sappy. Unlike a lot of kids' movies, there's little to cringe about in Sky High.
Does Sky High embarrass superheroes? Probably, a little. But it also expresses the fundamental admiration for courage and resourcefulness that's always been the cornerstone of the genre. It's a shame that filmmakers can't express that without cloaking themselves in irony first, but then we live in an age where even commercials come filtered through half-a-dozen lenses of detachment and self-awareness. Superheroes may be getting off light.
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