The 7 best comic book movies

The Joker turns 70 this year. The clown prince premiered in the northern hemisphere spring of 1940 in Batman’s first standalone series. Batman himself, as well as Superman and some other, lesser-known characters, are a few years older even than Mr J. Back then it was all about domino masks, tights, capes, and good-old-fashioned crime-fighting, with a dash of Freudian introspection on the side. With the exception of Superman, ostensibly the first super-powered comic book hero, straight detective stories were favoured for a good many years till the likes of Marvel popularised super-powers in the fifties and sixties and the genre exploded. Comic books were respectable back then. Hypermasculine men fought each other while hyperfeminine women floated around in the background; morals were unquestioned; the pulpy, predictable serials were tasteful and plain, unadorned with such concerns as sexuality, racism or moral ambiguity. Crime was duly punished, and justice was pursued in a cheap, disposable monthly medium affordable to the average middle-class American kid.

In the 80s comics underwent something of a rennaissance. Batman was rebooted in a grittier, morally challenging storyline, the X-Men got serious with Wolverine’s brutal training in Tokyo finally explored, and out of a hole in the sky fell the Watchmen series, one of very few successful stand-alone comic books. Since that sudden reversal of content comic books have floundered in an endless torrent of glossy, cookie-cutter superhero stories. The art styles have gotten more sleek and gratuitous in their anatomic inaccuracies, but the actual content, as far as this detached, casual observer can tell, hasn’t developed into anything really worth taking notice of.

The 90s saw a brief rush of comic book movies — The Mask, Spawn, Men In Black — that were okay, performing so-so at the box office, but it wasn’t until Bryan Singer’s X-Men that the world finally got a superhero flick that did justice to its (overrated) source material. It was fun, subversive, mature and posed a few interesting sci-fi questions, while telling a remarkably personal tale with emotion and flourish. After the critical and commercial success of this pioneering film the floodgates were opened and in the past decade we’ve seen just about every single major character in the Marvel stable trotted out for a cinematic outing or two, and DC haven’t slacked off in their contribution either. But the vast majority of these films have been mindless dross homogenised by the Hollywood machine — witness The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Elektra, The Spirit, etc., for evidence of this.

There have, however, been many shining lights in the dark. Here are the seven best comic book movies as judged by yours truly.

7 - V For Vendetta (2005)

Socio-political commentary has a propensity to become dangerously dull. How do you make it interesting, you ask? Add masked vigilantism, a fascist regime, some huge explosions, and Tchaikovsky to it. A dark, apparently faithful adaptation of the “graphic novel” (isn’t it cute when they try to sound mature?) of the same name, the V film is dark, violent, and socially relevant. The themes of freedom, justice and masked vigilantism are classic comic book fare, but here it’s all wrapped up in a smart, mature tale that’s pretty fun to watch.

6 – Road To Perdition (2002)

Bet you didn’t know this was originally a comic book. Actually I bet you didn’t even see this movie, hardly anyone did. But it’s got Tom Hanks in it, and a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, not to mention Paul Newman, some delicious cinematography, and some cool shootouts. The story is a tad melodramatic and simplistic, but the scrambled morality of gangster lifestyles is explored in a more compelling manner here than in any Scorcese flick to date. Sam Mendes, of American Beauty, directs.

5 – Iron Man (2008)

Funnyman Jon Favreau miraculously wound up at the helm of this (by ’08) routine superhero origin flick, the first act in an inevitable franchise. Thankfully Favreau kept the film sharp with the casting of Robert Downey, Jr. in the title role as Iron Man / Tony Stark, whose moral compass isn’t as concrete as Spidey’s or the Bat’s, and in the film’s fresh, brisk pace and tone. Anyone who claims not to have had fun watching Iron Man is lying.

4 – X-Men 2 (2003)

Captain Jean-Luc Picard scoots around in a mind-controlled wheelchair, staring people down and unleashing his merry band of mutants on the world, trying to make it a better place, while Gandalf the Grey floats around in a metal bucket for a helmet trying to stop Picard for no other reason than “the Nazis killed my parents, therefore everyone deserves to die.” Okay, okay, there’s more to this sequel to the film that started the heroic avalanche in 2000 — some breathtaking action set-pieces, some palpable drama between the main characters, a very cool sci-fi aesthetic, and the kind of professional filmmaking usually reserved for “serious” movies. X2 perfectly rides the line between mindless entertainment and intellectual stimulation, with great performances all round. Shame about X-Men 3 and X-men: Origins: Wolverine: The Prequel: The Beginning.

3 – The Dark Knight (2008)

Oh Christopher Nolan, you simultaneously delight and disappoint me. The Dark Knight is a big, loud, dark, complex film on every level. Christian Bale’s Batman, introduced in the middling Batman Begins, faces his first true test as a superhero in the form of Heath Ledger’s ultra-villain the Joker. The Joker’s wicked anarchic sense of humour is simultaneously amusing and terrifying, and Ledger’s performance of the character is the stuff of cinema legend. He inhabits the role, a role invested with such realism and integrity as to be utterly repulsive but ultimately fascinating and compelling at the same time. Bats is forced to question his own morality and identity in the face of the Joker’s cruel and unusual pranks and set-ups, meanwhile contending with a psychotically deranged Harvey Dent / Two-Face incited to violence by the Clown Prince himself. Batman’s dark, ugly world is a thematically beautiful and intellectually interesting place: every villain in Gotham City has a fascinating aspect to their psyche, and Batman invariably winds up being the most boring character in anything he’s in. The reason I don’t love Nolan’s second bat-flick is because it’s so cool, so loud, so flashy, so dark and awesome and gritty that there’s very little actual character to latch onto when all is said and done. The emotion is there, it’s just buried miles deep beneath layers and layers of crowd-pleasing aesthetic stylings.

2 – Watchmen (2009)

Having just criticised The Dark Knight for being shallow, I feel a pang of guilt including Watchmen in a higher position on this list. It is literally a shot-for-shot, visual-effects-driven recreation of the original comic book, but beneath the arguably flimsy veneer is the single most coherent, challenging and daring narratives in the history of comics. Some masked vigilante kills some other masked guy, and there’s a scientist who was de-atomised and is now a blue god, and there’s some Rorschach-wearing clown going around being unpredictably awesome for some reason — the plot merely serves as a prism through which comic books can be deconstructed and scrutinised and then spat back out as a damning observation of the world circa 1985, and as such, it is amazingly fun to watch. I identified most with John Osterman (Billy Crudup) as he undertook the journey to coming to terms with his superpowers: Dr Manhattan, as he is known, is an immediately more realistic depiction of a superhero than was ever depicted before Watchmen hit the shelves — he’s over the whole infinite power thing, he’s over seeing through time, and he’s bored of life as we know it. I guess that’s the kind of thing ultimate power brings you — boredom. So why do we all spend our lives scurrying to secure a slice of the power pie? Imagine thoughts like this, suggested constantly and in every scene of this visually entertaining flick, and you have some sense of the extent to which I was engaged and challenged.

1 – Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Ah, the amazing Spider-Man. The original Spidey flick was one of the earlier superhero flicks, and one of the better ones. Director Sam Raimi infused the story with enough classic character archetypes, modern references, universal coherence and pure, undiluted emotion for the film to be a promising start to the franchise. But it was nothing compared to the first and as yet only good sequel, in which the characters set up in the first film are dutifully knocked down in one of the most brutal, uncompromising but ultimately optimistic middle acts in the history of cinema. I enjoy every single scene of this movie, and it’s one of those few movies I could watch a dozen times and not become utterly sick of.

So there you have it, Froley’s favourite 7 comic book movies!

Honourable mention should go to 1978′s Superman for setting the bar for superhero dramas in their current form; Zack Snyder’s 300 proved that sometimes even slavish adaptation of the oft-maligned source material can prove to be entertaining; and David Cronenberg’s A History Of Violence barely even resembles a comic book movie at all, what with the lack of capes and superpowers and whatnot, and is all the better for the absence of such silly things.

What are some of your favourite comic book movies of all time? Do you think Hollywood has gone a little costume-crazy since X-Men was released, ten years ago? Do you think the style of storytelling and characterisation inherent in comic books is leaking into non-comic book movies? I want to know what you think, dammit!