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While Richard Donner’s Superman is generally regarded as the first major mainstream superhero blockbuster, which Roger Ebert gave full marks, that wasn’t the first time the genre blew him away.
These days, comic book adaptations are among cinema’s most polarising pictures. Box office returns are down, the number of reboots is up, and everyone from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino has taken a steaming dump all over them at one time or another, and Ebert was no different in some respects.
He liked a few of them, with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 winning praise, but when they were done badly, he spared no scorn in eviscerating Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, Tim Story’s Fantastic Four, and Frank Miller’s The Spirit, among others.
Until Christopher Reeve came along and convinced audiences that a man could fly, Ebert’s favourite superhero flick hailed from Hong Kong. 1975’s Infra-Man, where a villain awakens from a lengthy slumber to conquer the planet with only a solar-powered man in a silly suit capable of stopping them, is nonsense, but he found it to be wonderfully glorious nonsense.
“Gigantic mutant monsters with built-in death rays attack Infra-Man, who can hurl lightning bolts from the soles of his feet, and what do they do? They have a karate fight,” he wrote with almost incredulous enthusiasm. “After ten minutes of chopping and socking and doing acrobatic flips, then they zap each other.”
From where he was sitting, which sounds like perched on the edge of his seat, Ebert found the preposterous caper to be “totally, almost joyfully absurd,” and he even managed to make a prediction that would become ever more true today, in an age where most superhero flicks are cut from an almost identical cloth and fail to bring anything even remotely fresh or innovative to the table.
“When they stop making movies like Infra-Man, a little light will go out of the world,” Ebert eulogised, blissfully unaware of a time to come when the aforementioned Fantastic Four would get five different movies with four different line-ups, The Old Guard 2 is a thing that exists, and Hugh Jackman is still playing Wolverine.
Calling it one of his guilty pleasures a decade after its release, Ebert explained how, “When I was watching Infra-Man for the first time, I knew I was seeing some kind of berserk masterpiece,” calling it exactly the kind of movie that’s allowed to unfold “when the lunatics take over the studio,” which he meant entirely as a compliment.
“I have no idea how or why Infra-Man was made,” he concluded. “But there’s never been another movie like it, and that may be a good thing.” In today’s world of identikit superhero slop, maybe the world needs a few more Infra-Mans more than ever.
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