Good live-action superhero movies are worth their weight in gold. (To the aficionado, anyway: to the filmmakers, considerably more than that.) MERCURY MAN isn't bad, though it rarely rises above the level of the first SPIDER-MAN (which boasted some great cgi and some solid performances, but which suffered, too, from some really bad cgi and some lapses in logic that were downright mind-boggling). Unlike Peter Parker, Mercury Man also happens to be (in addition to being a super-powered hero), pretty good with his hands and feet. (One of the more interesting superheroes from days of yore was a character called Wildcat. He dressed all in black, with a cat-like mask. In "real life," he was a former heavyweight boxing champion of the world. It's always more interesting when a hero can rely on some kind of skill other than his super power.) (And, if the foregoing has in any way whetted your appetite, check out the new BRAVE AND THE BOLD series: in one episode, Batman teams up with none other than Wildcat himself.) (And, while I'm on the subject of superheroes, I highly recommend the DVD release of HULK VS. THOR. This happens to be- as far as I know- the first time Thor has been done right since the mid-1960s- in a limited-animation series that was scarcely more than panels taken directly from the comics themselves-, although The Hulk is twice his size.) If you're a die-hard fan of the genre, you could do a whole lot worse than MERCURY MAN.
Review of Mercury Man
