It’s a very encouraging sign when a film opens in the pulsating otherspace of a multicolored vortex bordering reality. That’s not to say this is a metonymy for an extended Adam Egypt Mortimer Cinematic Universe. But for anyone still bowled over by the writer-director’s 2019 triumph Daniel Isn’t Real (a masterpiece so poorly handled by its U.S. distributor that it never even got a Blu-ray release), that polytonic miasma lets you know that, in both that film and this one, things are about to get cosmic and fraught, and the multiverse itself may quake with the following journey. Archenemy is a deeply weird and profoundly enjoyable film, one adept at shifting realities even as it sometimes posits superheroism as just another example of drunken white people foolishness. (Much respect is due a film that uses chopped-and-screwed music as a signifier for permeable cosmic boundaries.)
This is a great film for reconnecting with your comic-book roots (see also: the intensive yet convivial Cerebro podcast) and for confronting the slippery slope of nostalgia in a crypt of a mall. It’s great for luxuriating in the deceptively subtle and sometimes expansively muscular score by Umberto, aka Matt Hill (when the major chords hit, it will carbonate your subconscious and pump up the adrenaline), and for taking stock of where and how stories resonate with you.
Max Fist (Joe Manganiello) is a person experiencing homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles. He’s also a hero from the city of Chromium, wielder of the crystal fist, and at one point in time powerful enough to punch through the barriers of spacetime itself. He’ll tell you all about it, if you’re buying. It keeps the consumptive loneliness at bay. And though he’s built like a brick shithouse, you just see the ache. As with anyone who’s spent much time playing D&D, Manganiello understands the way that characteristics define how a persona evolves, sanding some edges down while sharpening others, requiring the utmost care when approaching.
Someday, we as a society will talk about how revelatory Manganiello was in 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. He made a decent impression as the himbo werewolf Alcide on True Blood, but the Magic Mike films let him do even more as a physical comedian and an implement of affectionate satire. In Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, he finds the sweet spot of wholesome pansexual horniness that finally let one of America’s icons be happily gay. Here Manganiello unlocks the lives of those around him with wrought-hewn charm and persuasive mania. Also, bone-shattering violence.
Angular Schiele/Sienkiewicz-like animation serves a dual purpose in representing Max’s tales of Chromium, which may also be the delusions resulting from, or leading to, his heroic alcohol and methamphetamine habits. “It’s not a planet, it’s a city,” Max maintains, steadfast in his identity as an earthling of some sort; from somewhen. But his time on the Earth of here and now (“your grim rock,” he calls it) is a sad exile. That intersection between animation and live action and addiction and inspiration pays homage to Mortimer’s love of 1982’s Pink Floyd: The Wall, and that heightened narrative plane is a great space for this story to unfold.
Mortimer is really good at tucking these kinetic little city symphonies in and around the narrative, getting into the byways of downtown Los Angeles the way Daniel Isn’t Real did with New York City. There’s a remarkable tracking shot through a spiraling parking garage that follows Max as he reclaims the only item he has from the time before — it’s an iconic moment befitting a hero of some sort.
Orphaned siblings Hamster (Skylan Brooks) and Indigo (Zolee Griggs) — he a curious photographer/journalist, she a “sugarplum fairy interstellar princess” working her way to independence on the lower rungs of the local drug operation — are our anchors in the human experience. This is Hamster’s world we’re living in, and the film does an excellent job of letting the viewer observe and determine the differences between the worlds depicted (including our own). He’s battling to get by just like his sister, and to do so involves packaging his experiences for unseen internet dilettantes and voyeurs. Because if there’s something to healthily aspire to, it’s being loved and seen as relevant by the internet. And as he befriends Max, they have to negotiate the boundaries of their discourse. (Mortimer as a filmmaker is always focused on negotiation and boundaries between characters, and it’s a great trait for one’s body of work to have.)
The supporting cast includes Glenn “Dennis Reynolds” Howerton as The Manager — blond evil incarnate — complemented as the face of nefarious middle management by podcaster Paul Scheer decked out like Gaspar Noé. There’s a lot to unpack about the vertical arrangement of modern crime as it goes from street hustling all the way up to pandimensional skyscrapers. And then of course, there’s the titular archenemy, spanning a couple of realities. 2020 was already the year when Amy Seimetz wrote and directed the masterful She Dies Tomorrow, and now it’s also the year when she gets to preside over a technorganic empire in robin’s-egg-blue pleather with exquisitely manicured brown nails and a perfectly delivered pair of diva monologues. If there is any justice in the world of comic-book-derived cinema, Seimetz will play Emma Frost.
Daniel Isn’t Real was my favorite film of 2019, so the bar is set very high. And though Archenemy doesn’t quite hit the same home run into the hippocampus that Daniel did, it’s a spry and inventive take on storytelling as something genetic and mutable, the way that cultures adapt, and how perspective can be a bridge and/or a weapon. It deserves a place on the shelf alongside Unbreakable, Candyman and Heavy Metal.
