Mystery Men (1999)

Champion City sleeps easy, protected by its glamorous superpowered defender, Captain Amazing.

It's also defended, albeit a lot less prominently (or successfully) by a number of lesser known wannabe superheroes.  There's the Blue Raja, Master of Fork-fu.  Or Mr Furious, who harnesses the power of his incandescent rage.  Or the Spleen who ... well actually, let's not talk about what the Spleen does.

Anyway, when supervillain Casanova Frankenstein is released from jail, and Captain Amazing goes missing, it seems like the also-rans are now the only guys left in the race to save the city.  Can they combine their admittedly mediocre talents and prevent disaster, or are they destined to be the punchline once again?

It's hard to imagine it now, but 20 years ago the idea that superhero films would soon be dominating the box office would have seemed like a wild fantasy.  Sure, occasional tent-pole releases like 1989's Batman might succeed, but there had been quite a lot more misses than hits.  This 1999 effort to turn spandex into box office gold, alas, ends up in the latter column.  It assembles a great cast and has a pretty funky soundtrack, but it doesn't really know what to do with them, relying on fart jokes and people accidentally sitting on forks as its main vein of "comedy", and failing to offer any fun action sequences to raise the tempo.  After all, these guys are putzes so we can't see them do anything too cool.

Fifteen years later, Marvel would show how to do the "wacky bunch of misfits save the day" thing in fine style, but I doubt they took any tips from the Mystery Men when they did so.