Super Movies! The first one with a black superhero

 

Title: The Meteor Man

What Year?: 1993

Classification: Parody

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

For this review, I’m starting with a recap. When I reviewed Sky High for the last installment, I tried to give an explanation and further theory about why I’ve featured so many parodies (3 or 4 depending on how you count Creepshow), and further stated that if anything, I had done fewer than I expected. This time, I’m back with the case to prove my point, a movie that was not just in my mind from the beginning but a major reason I thought of doing this feature at all. It all started when I was reviewing (dear Logos) Mac And Me, and tried listing the most notorious, obscure or willfully unmovied entries I had ever encountered spontaneously in the pre-Netflix/ Youtube days. The one that topped my list was a movie I had seen in an actual theater. This time, I’m reviewing that movie, long after I expected to, and it should go without saying that I wasn’t saving the best for later. I thus introduce The Meteor Man, the first superhero movie with an African American star and cast, and very conceivably the reason it took 25 years to get another one.

Our story starts in space, with an asteroid drifting through the void, accompanied by a stirring score. Then, just when you might be feeling charitable, we jump straight to present-day Earth and music that sounds like a 40-year-old white guy’s idea of ‘90s rap. In short order, we meet Jeff, an inner-city teacher whose pupils are getting beat up despite his instructions to run away from bullies, and the Golden Lords, a gang that’s deliberately corrupting the youth of the community with inexplicably good fashion. The balance of power changes when Jeff is literally hit in the chest by a glowing green meteorite. Somehow, he not only survives but obtains a mixed bag of superpowers, including flight, x-ray vision, and most intriguingly the ability to learn the contents of any book he touches. He begins a campaign to clean up the neighborhood by beating up some bad guys and telling others to be nice once they figure out they can’t shoot him, all while his family and neighbors not only know his identity but provide feedback on his costume. But his new career has put him on a collision course with the leader of the Golden Lords, and the remnants of the meteor are still in the wind. When the gangster gets his own powers, can Meteor Man and the neighbors prevail?

The Meteor Man was written and directed by Robert Townsend who also starred as the titular hero. The Chicago-born filmmaker had previously directed the films The Hollywood Shuffle and The Five Heartbeats, cowritten with Keenan Ivory Wayans; tellingly, the Wayans brother had no known involvement in the superhero project. The film assembled a range of high-level black stars including Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones and Roy Fegan as the villain Simon Caine. The late Frank Gorshin, known for his role as the Riddler on the original Batman TV series, appeared as a senior gangster. The movie was released in August 1993, to mixed or unfavorable reviews. It was an unquestioned commercial failure, with a box office of $8 million against an estimated $20M budget. The movie had a limited-series Marvel comic in which he teamed up with Spider Man, but did not lead to a further role in the Marvel universe. After a contemporary VHS release, the movie appears to have fallen “out of print” prior to disc release in 2014.

For my experiences, my best reconstruction is that this movie came out just after my 13^th birthday. If I did see it at that time, it would have been a special occasion; more likely, I saw it when it hit the dollar theaters, which wouldn’t have taken long. What I clearly recall was that even at age 13, I found it odd, problematic, and definitely longer than necessary. (The actual running time is 100 minutes.)  I suppose I didn’t really think about it again until  Black Panther was suddenly a big deal in early 2018, and then mainly because I saw a joke about it. Once I started doing movie reviews (again), I discussed it a few times, and encountered one particular person with far more negative recollections than mine. I still decided to review it, particularly after starting this feature, but it was a little trouble to find it without paying for a hard-copy disk. After going through a lot of backlogged detritus for my other features, I decided it was time to cover this one, so I streamed a clearly bootlegged video with ads. As with many things, it was not as good as even I remembered, and a lot more awkward.

And this brings me further than usual without saying much about the actual movie. If the goal is balance, the best thing I can say are that the performances are good, especially and predictably from James Earl Jones. (I decline to comment on Cosby.) I can also concede that there is undoubtedly a lot of humor that would have gone over my head then or now. There’s also plenty of real creativity with the superhero concepts. It’s nice enough to see a superhuman with abilities more nuanced than breaking things or blowing them up. To the movie’s further credit, the more unusual powers genuinely contribute to the story, though there’s a big missed opportunity to tie Meteor Man’s mastery of books to a broader message about literacy and education. The most intriguing twist is a subplot where an ordinary mortal foolhardily impersonates Meteor Man. It presents a genuine conundrum within the “secret identity” premise, which might have been more interesting if the bad guys weren’t already clearly zeroing in on Jeff.

On the other side, the chronic problem is that the movie keeps either watering down or flatly undermining an already mixed message. The story never feels committed to setting up a conflict between good and evil. The neighbors are mostly set up as either fearful or passive, which comes uncomfortably close to blaming the victims, and would certainly be called out as far worse if people of color weren’t on both sides of the camera. This in many ways distracts from bigger problems with the villains. For the most part, the movie seems to treat the rank-and-file gangsters as “good” kids who took a bad turn, which is at least followed through with as certain ones change sides. But for this to really work, we should see one or a few who are far more brutal and flatly sadistic by comparison, and the story pulls far too many punches to develop that angle. Then there’s the completely surreal costumes they all share all but nullify them as a convincing threat. It makes Fegan’s otherwise credible character feel more like a “Queer Eye” guy gone native, an angle which might conceivably have worked if any of the Wayans had been involved. (I’m now tempted to review Blankman just for comparison.) All these issues just build up to the mindboggling finale, which finally manages some inspired and inspiring moments as the neighbors and some of the gangsters come to Meteor Man’s aid. But then it just keeps going, and going, until even 13-year-old me decided it was wrecking its own point.

Now it’s time for the “one scene”, and I’m going with one I probably would have remembered from the theater if I’d tried harder to reconstruct the movie before viewing it. As we approach the final act, Jeff is out of costume at a triumphant assembly of the neighborhood. As he steps outside, several cars pull away, and then his mother calls out a warning. Of course, Simon and some of his goons are waiting. Jeff freezes as Simon calls out, just as the unsuspecting neighbors come pouring out behind him. The gangsters open fire, and it’s possibly the only time we see the villains do something truly and willfully evil for its own sake: By now, Simon is clearly satisfied that Jeff is Meteor Man and so beyond harm, but is willing to settle for taking out as many bystanders as possible. Naturally, Jeff goes full superhuman, blocking every stray bullet at superhuman speed. The effects aren’t great, if no worse than the big-budget effects of the Super Man movies a decade earlier, but they are executed with enough charm to be effective. Finally, when the bad guys have given up or ran out of ammunition, we see a closeup as Jeff opens his hand… and we see blood. It’s just the right combination of heroic, silly and genuinely poignant, begging the question once again what happened to the rest of the movie.

In closing, I can only give what has kept me baffled if not angry about this movie: How do we account for a movie this evidently well-intended and clearly and woefully out of step if the influence of racism or its less malign but more insidious cousin paternalism are off the table? To put it in perspective, the analogy I have framed for myself is a New England progressive spinning a story about a hero going into the old coal country to show the meth dealers and welfare moms how to better themselves. It doesn’t have to be about race, or exactly ethnicity, but it’s certainly in the ballpark for regionalist and classist, and it all puts the progressively-minded white viewer in the position of a cop being called on to pick a side in a domestic disturbance. That, in turn, goes right along with my own longstanding suspicion is that there are divisions in the nominal African-American community that go back possibly all the way to Africa, but that’s a rope I can hang myself with another time. For now, it will suffice to say that this is a movie we should probably be glad was made, but don’t have to be happy to watch. With that, I move on, more happily than usual.