Tanya Gold vom Guardian begibt sich auf die Suche nach einer Superheldin, scheitert – und verreißt gleich vier Filme in einem Artikel, darunter Catwoman und Elektra. Großes Kino: I need a heroine.

Lara (Croft) drives a motorbike along the Great Wall of China and sky-dives off a bank, but just as I am beginning to relax, The Message pops up. “Do you ever do anything the easy way?” asks her colleague. “You’re afraid of letting anyone in,” says her lover, who is the sort of man deaf-blind women pick up in Soho after a crack binge. Lara shoots him, snivels and strikes the noble superheroine-in-solitude pose. Do you understand, ladies? Superwoman can’t have a super relationship or super contentment and the pay-off for her super gift is isolation, loneliness, misanthropy and, eventually, no doubt, super-arthritis.

My quest for superwoman ends with Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. In scene one the Angels, wearing very small clothes, lay waste a gaggle of cheery Mongolian gangsters. They return to LA, to lie under the heel of Charlie, who is voiced by uber-patriarch John Forsyth, who will forever be Blake from Dynasty. The Angels have to recover some important data for the FBI. I watch as they succeed by lap-dancing, pole-dancing and disco-dancing. They change costumes every 30 seconds and wear aquamarine mascara and, after two hours, the Angels’ state-of-the-art vaginas see off baddie Demi Moore and her tits. It is less heroic than naked; less fabulous than herpes.

Und Christopher Orr von Salon hat auch noch fünf Tipps, wie man einen anständigen Superhelden auf die Leinwand zauber (kostenloser Tagespass erforderlich):

2. Find the right stars.
It’s hard to imagine anyone better embodying the “hero in all of us” than Spider-Man‘s Tobey McGuire. Hellboy could have been written with Ron Perlman in mind. And Christian Bale has an air of regal entitlement befitting billionaire Bruce Wayne and a strong jaw (finally!) befitting Batman. Moreover, any picture, superpowered or not, that has Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as nemeses is likely to be good, particularly if it can throw in a dose of Aussie masculinity from Hugh Jackman. Countryman Eric Bana, by contrast, didn’t much register in Hulk. We should have been so lucky with Jessica Alba, whose embarrassing performance as Invisible Woman in Fantastic Four seemed mostly an excuse to have her shuck her clothes like Claude Rains’ invisible man. (Parents, fret not: You can’t see anything.) And then there’s Daredevil‘s Ben Affleck: A strong jaw is a good thing for a masked crusader, but too much is still too much; as he swung through the city, one half-feared he’d turn his head abruptly and level an apartment building.