Where'd you park the invisible car?

Rating: Null/10 (23 November 2012)

"Megamind" stars Will Ferrell as "Megamind", a super-villain who delights in his daily feuds with local superhero Metro Man. Metro Man is played by Brad Pitt, his character a suave, debonair and hilariously cheesy ode to all things manly. Megamind, meanwhile, is your classic superhero villain, only fifty times cooler and a hundred times more slick. Forget Heath Ledger's overrated Joker. Megamind's where it at. The guy struts about like a cocksure peacock, smoke machines, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and strobe lighting forever heralding his oncoming awesomeness. Megamind understands the showmanship of villainy. The wild, ego-maniacal, unbridled jouissance of it all. The guy's Id unleashed. You can almost smell his cool. He also wears mascara.
"Megamind" is also a bit deeper than your typical superhero flick. Here the villain, Megamind, is shown to be a byproduct of both the city which ostracises him and the "good guys" who bully him. Metro Man is himself a giant egotistical jerk whose craving for power is a result of his own abusive, absent parents. Meanwhile, most of the film charters how crime and law, superhero and super-villain, all function as a kind of self-sustaining feedback loop. Late in the picture another character, a socially and sexually rejected kid who is abused by both our hero and villain, himself becomes a violent super villain. The film is unique in that it positions us to sympathise with villainy and explicitly shows how abuse is oft internalised and then redirected.
Mostly, though, the film is simply cool. Megamind moves like an 1980s heavy metal rock-star. He's obsessed with "presentation", his cape frequently fluttering to some blazing Guns n Roses track. The rest of the film pokes fun at overcooked superhero clichés. Its female love interest, for example, is modelled on DC comics' Lois Lane, and Megamind's dad is a nod to Brando's Kal-El. Elsewhere the film, which is almost always funny, parodies glam rock and comic book tropes. As computer animation allows for a kind of hyper fine-tuning, the film's virtual camera work and virtual action sequences are machine precise.
8.5/10 – As Pixar drowns in phony syrup, DreamWorks Animation seems to get better. Worth two viewings.