Supercon is a 2018 comedy about a ragtag group of former TV stars and comic book artists, who make their living working at conventions, deciding to steal the loot from a crooked promoter and an overbearing former TV icon.
Times have changed, especially in the wide wake of Marvel superhero movies that have reset the landscape for box office success. The once easy target of comic book conventions as fodder for one-off jokes have shifted from the stereotypical nerdy basement dweller to mainstream, hyperbolic popularity. It’s now cool to be a ‘nerd’. Has been for a while. Knowing that, it’s a little strange to see a film like Zak Knutson‘s Supercon do what it tries to do, mixing absurdist comedy with a sort of heist flick mentality that tries to poke fun at both. It fails. Spectacularly.
Gil Bartell (Mike Epps) runs a comic convention in Louisiana, called Supercon, which he sees as opportunity to take advantage of those wound up in the culture, booking B-stars to the show and then jacking up prices for autographs and photo zones. This includes Keith Mahar (Russell Peters), a former child star on a once controversial television show who is now up to his neck in legal fees for his divorce. His former co-star is Adam King (Clancy Brown), who is not a very nice guy, arrogant and self-centered, but listed as the shows big ticket draw. Joining Keith in support are his pals Matt (Ryan Kwanten), artist Allison (Maggie Grace), and Brock (Brooks Braselman), who enlist the help of Sid Newberry (John Malkovich), a writer for King, to help organize a heist of King’s income at the show to both help Keith with his debts and put King in his place. It won’t be easy. Or any fun it turns out.
Supercon is superficial at best when it comes to giving us a peek behind the curtain as it were, hardly putting any effort into establishing a genuine feel for the convention, sticking to obvious clichés. That’s partly due to the limited budget Knutson is working with, the film clearly a spitball project that keeps most of the characters in a constricted setting that fails to give the place any sense of scale. However, it’s possible to forgive its producers shallow pockets and try to go with the story, but it’s even worse on this end of the pool. The script, by Knutson, Andy Sipes, and Dana Snyder is woefully thin and painfully unfunny, the team thinking a slew of racial slurs and insults equate to easy laughs. They don’t, even if that’s not all that’s on the menu.
Keith played a child with a terminal disease that earned him all kinds of ridicule in the years since, making the choice to face this indignity and join the convention a tough one, though finds community in a group of others like him who bond over their pasts and lots of marijuana. Lots. That’s about as flattering a summary that can be mustered as the film pretty much works too hard to be raucous, missing the punch, and simply swinging with buffoonery. And hey, I love a good goofy comedy as much as the next, but the writing is so weak and the acting so tepid and uninspired, it’s basically a wreck. When you’re highlight is a man falling face first into a toilet full of feces after already spending too long with that same man gagging on pungent flatulence, well … what else can be said?
The real question is how did Maggie Grace and John Malkovich end up here? It’s something you’ll probably be asking yourself throughout, and while they, and Brown, who oddly takes to the role with a certain kind of lunacy, do what might be considered the best work in the movie, Supercon is a wholly wasteful effort, rife with empty humor and dead end jokes. Read a comic book instead. You’ll be much more entertained.