Director/Screenplay – Adam Egypt Mortimer, Story – Adam Egypt Mortimer & Lucas Passmore, Producers – Joe Manganiello, Nick Manganiello, Adam Egypt Mortimer, Daniel Noah, Kim Sherman, Lisa Whalen & Elijah Wood, Photography – Halyna Hutchins, Music – Umberto, Visual Effects – Matt Colloriface & Paul DeNigris, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edward L. Williams, Animation – Kevin Finnegan, Danny Perez & Sunando, Special Effects Supervisor – George Phillips, Makeup Effects – Mazena Puksto, Production Design – Ariel Vida. Production Company – RLJE Films/Legion M/Head Gear/359/Spectrevision.
Cast
Joe Manganiello (Max Fist), Skylan Brooks (Hamster), Zolee Griggs (Indigo), Glenn Howerton (The Manager), Amy Siemetz (Cleo Ventrik), Paul Scheer (Jimmy Krieg), Jessica Alain (Melissa), Joseph D. Reitman (Finn), Mac Brandt (Decker)
Plot
Hamster is eager to become a reporter at the internet magazine run by Melissa. He becomes fascinated by Max Fist, a homeless man he sees punching walls. Max tells Hamster a wild story about being a superhero from the city of Chromium in another dimension. He fell through a dimensional rift during a fight with his archenemy Cleo Ventrik, leaving him stranded on Earth without his powers. At the same time, Hamster’s sister Indigo works for the crime kingpin The Manager. She is ordered to go and pick up money owing from Jimmy Krieg only for Jimmy to shoot himself in a game of Russian Roulette. She seizes the opportunity and takes the money, but this brings The Manager’s enforcers after her. Max intervenes to slaughter The Manager’s thugs, but this places even more of a target on Hamster and Indigo.
Archenemy was the third film for Adam Egypt Mortimer, who first appeared with the modest horror film Some Kind of Hate (2015) and went onto the impressive imaginary companion horror film Daniel Isn’t Real (2019). Mortimer also produced the horror anthology Holidays (2016) and directed the New Year’s Day episode, as well as produced the SF film Sequence Break (2016). The budget for Archenemy was raised via crowdfunding and the film is produced by Legion M, which advertises itself as the only fan-owned production company – their other productions include Colossal (2017), Mandy (2018), Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019), Tolkien (2019), Save Yourselves (2020), The Man in the White Van (2023), You Can Call Me Bill (2023) and My Dead Friend Zoe (2024) – in collaboration with Elijah Wood’s Spectrevision.
There has been a great deal in the way of deconstructions and parodies of the Superhero Film since the 1980s including efforts such as The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), Mystery Men (1999), The Incredibles (2004), Brightburn (2019) and tv’s The Boys (2019- ). The film that Archenemy immediately reminds you of is P.G. Psycho Goreman (2020), which came out the same year, a clever and witty film where a kid befriends an intergalactic tyrant, as well as something of the subsequent Samaritan (2022) where a kid befriends retired superhero Sylvester Stallone.
What Archenemy resembles more than anything is the spate of films about delusional individuals who believed they were superheroes we had circa 2010 with the likes of South Korean A Man Who Was Superman (2008), the Australian Griff the Invisible (2010), James Gunn’s Super (2010) and in particular Defendor (2009), which also featured a homeless man who thought he was a superhero.
Joe Manganiello as Max Fist in action
For a time, Archenemy sits in a state of The Ambiguously Fantastic where we cannot be certain if Max has powers or is just another deluded individual – Max’s cosmic blood ends up being him snorting crystal meth – although this is not that sophisticated a treatment of the idea and eventually comes out on the side of Max being exactly what he claims to be. I do have some believability issues with the basic set-up – like that of Skylan Brooks’ streetwise African-American teenager becoming obsessed with a homeless man who to all indications is delusional and had addiction issues and being able to sell his ramblings to a hip online magazine to the point Max can get a following out of it.
Adam Egypt Mortimer pushes the material with a deranged coke-fiend energy. The most unhinged scenes are those where Zolee Griggs goes to get owed money from a drugged-out Paul Scheer and is forced into a game of Russian Roulette, which arrives at a bizarrely funny ending. Mortimer holds little back on the violence when Joe Manganiello erupts into action and the scenes come with a dark, gritty urgency.
With Archenemy being made on a low-budget ie. with barely anything other than physical effects, the scenes that take place in the world of Chromium are depicted using animation or often simple animatics. Unfortunately, the quality of the animation is cut-price and doesn’t give these scenes the breadth they need, although some of the scenes come with the colourful esotericism of something that approaches Marvel’s Doctor Strange.
