Griff the Invisible


2/4

Starring: Ryan Kwanten, Maeve Dermody, Patrick Brammall, David Webb

Rated PG-13 for Some Language and Violence

“Griff the Invisible” is not your average superhero movie.  In fact, that’s just a side-effect of one of the characters.  The film is really a romantic comedy, although for the first half, it’s a little too quirky for its own good.

Griff (Kwanten) is a shy and lonely office worker who has a secret: by night, he is the masked superhero Griff the Invisible.  Although, unlike Spider-Man or Superman, he’s not particularly well-liked.  Everyone thinks he’s nuts.  That all changes when he meets his brother Tim’s (Brammall) new girlfriend, Melody (Dermody), another social misfit.

This could have been a charming, lightweight romantic comedy, and it is at the end.  The problem is that it’s tough getting there.  For the first part of the film, writer/director Leon Ford  appears to be channeling Wes Anderson, or any of those other annoying “hipster” directors who treat their social misfit characters with contempt.  He keeps things way too muted and staccato, when it should be earnest and likable.

It’s not Ryan Kwanten’s fault.  I haven’t seen “True Blood,” the show that made him a star of sorts, but I was deeply impressed with his guest stint as a marine accused of rape and murder on “Law and Order: SVU” and his voice acting in “Legends of the Guardians.”  Kwanten is good enough to capture Griff’s humanity.  Although he is a sad social misfit, he is sympathetic.

If only the same could be said for Melody.  Melody is too weird for her own good, or Griff’s.  She’s straight out of a hipster movie, almost to the point where I was wondering if she had Asperger’s Syndrome.  She’s an “experimentologist,” who spends her free time testing her theory that if atoms line up correctly, she’ll be able to move through the dead space inbetween them (thus allowing her to walk through walls).  These two are definitely not right for each other, their personalities could lead them to harm themselves or others.  She does get more normal as the movie goes on (which is an abrupt and poorly motivated change, by the way), which is to the film’s benefit.

There are some modest pleasures in the beginning.  Griff’s fantasy sequences of being a superhero are fun (although it is at times hard to tell if it’s magical realism or something else).  And there is a naughty sense of glee seeing him get revenge of Gary (Webb), the office bully who delights in abusing him.

Still, although I liked the ending very much, the first half is too problematic for me to recommend the film outright.  I may just be a cynic, though.

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