Anyone hoping for a ray of sunshine through all the dank, dark clouds that have made up the recent rash of genre spoofs – Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans – should semi-celebrate. Superhero Movie is not the heinous hunk of landfill those other attempts at humour represent. Instead, it’s a seldom hit/often miss attempt by some former members of the Airplane! team to recapture a little of that film’s old school satire.

High-school nerd Rick Riker (Drake Bell) pines for popular gal Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton), and she holds a secret torch for him as well. Still, the couple can’t get together and, while on a field trip to a local science lab, Rick is bitten by a radioactive insect. Soon he has superpowers, like incredible reflexes and the ability to climb walls. He becomes the Dragonfly. Meanwhile, dying mogul Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald) looks to an experimental DNA treatment to cure him. The procedure backfires, turning the CEO into a life-force draining demon. For him to achieve immortality, thousands must die and, while Landers develops an evil persona known as the Hourglass to achieve his aims, Rick tries to save the city and get the girl at the same time.

The first shocking thing about Superhero Movie is how quasi-coherent it is. Writer/director Craig Mazin, who cut his cinematic teeth on the likable James Gunn comic book The Specials, does a good job of channelling Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman Begins, without going whole hog into pointless pop-culture minutia. Sure, the questionable riffs are here, the Tom Cruise/Scientology joke being so inside as to warrant a shrug of recognition. Similarly, the non-webslinger material gets short shrift, tossed at the screen in dribs and drabs without being explored to its fullest.

A noticeable plus, though, comes in the casting of Drake Bell as Rick Riker. Having spent the last nine years under Nickelodeon’s kid-friendly tutelage (he was part of the immensely popular tween hits The Amanda Show and Drake and Josh) the very likable young actor has been looking for a film role to push him further out into the mainstream. His wonderful work here just might do it. Sure, the script fails him time and time again, but we never see the desperation that has come with so many of these off-balance efforts.

Of course, the many remaining missteps ruin everything. Leslie Nielsen is just too old now to pull off deadpan sexual entendres. While cameos from Brent Spiner and Robert Hayes are fun, McDonald’s Hourglass chews the scenery for no apparent rhyme or reason. As though he’s been over-caffeinated and simply needs to vent.

Still, if future instalments follow Mazin’s concept and simply stick with making fun of specific cinematic types instead of whatever randomly falls down the YouTube/Facebook pipeline the next of these ‘Movies’ might not be another sign of the entertainment apocalypse. In fact, Superhero Movie should be taken as a well-meaning but ultimately uneven lesson in how to handle future parodies.

Bill Gibron