There is a funny passage in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. It’s in Chapter One, and it’s when everyman Hollis Mason (The Night Owl) and the neurotic, combative Laurel Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) go out to dinner. In word balloons, the pair discuss part of the attraction of being a superhero was the costumery. “Why did we dress up like that,” she asks. “The Keene Act was the best thing that ever happened to us.” It’s clear from Hollis’s reaction that he doesn’t share Laurel’s views on superhero costumery.

The passage hints at the fetishistic lure of fighter costumes, that at root the comic’s adventure story exists to offer an excuse to draw and view women in tight leather and thighboots.

And that is exactly what is wrong with My Super Ex Girl Friend. Here, director Ivan Reitman and costume designer Laura Jean Shannon ( Elf) had a marvelous opportunity to turn on every comic book nerd in the world (and increase their film’s revenues). They had at their disposal one of the most beautiful women in the world. She is about two heads taller than most everyone else in the film, and she’s got a gene pool to die for (there is a statue of her mother back in the homeland). And how do they dress her up? Like a Swedish schoolmarm’s idea of a super heroine. Shannon could have done it: several years earlier she made Lena Olin hotter than hot in Romeo is Bleeding in heels and stockings.

Of course, there are some scenes when Jenny Johnson (Thurman) is in “disguise” as a workaday Manhattan girl with a job in an art gallery and a prim way of warding off strange men on the subway. There it makes sense that she should have buttons up to her neck, lace collars, and a generally sexless exterior.

But when the clothes come off, underneath should be — a super hot superhero costume. I’m talking tight go go boots, shiny leggings or stockings, flexible lycra, a form fitting top that pushes her bosom up enough to distract even the most stolid robber. She should move through the air and stride down the street with domineering authority. Her costume should have the iconic necessity of Lara Croft’s. When G-Girl first appears in combat at the start of the film, she looks like someone out of a Pat Benatar music video with half-stockings and high heeled shoes rather than authority-inducing boots, far from the mode of a superheroine.
But that is the diffence. My Super Ex Girlfriend is not a superhero comedy. It is a romantic comedy with a superheroine in it.

To that end, it follows the lite New York romantic comedy. It begins with the corniest of New York movie openings, an arial view of the city with a sprightly if unmemorable soft jazz tune behind it. Then we’re in the midst of a crime, with jewel thieves thwarted by the mysteriously named G-Girl. And then we are plunged into the subway, where Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), a designer, is on his way to work, when he tries to pick up Jenny. From then on it is all love, love, love, with Matt a forgettable nebbish who manages to find himself looking down on the needy, neurotic Jenny.

The real love of his life is co-worker Hannah Lewis (Anna Faris), but she dates a handsome underwear model. And Matt’s best friend is Vaughn (Rainn Wilson, of TV’s The Office), i.e., that type of best friend in youth comedies such as EuroTrip who is really a nemesis with all his arrogance and bad advice. Before the film is a trailer for John Tucker Must Die. In it is the 100th iteration of a scene also replicated in Super. There, an experienced girl teaches a nerd girl to kiss; here, Vaughn gives Matt advice on how to break up with Jenny, even holding his hand. The fact that his character is named Vaughn may be a vague salute to Vince Vaughn.

Matt dates Jenny, and then learns that she is the mysterious G-Girl. He has great sex with Jenny, and even meets her supervillain nemesis, Professor Bedlam, aka Barry (Eddie Izzard). But in the end, he really loves Hannah. Well, try to break up with someone whose PMS is even of superhuman proportions.

All this being said, in the end, despite inconsistently erotic apparel for Thurman, Super ends up being enjoyable in its modest way. The plot is reasonably well structured, if predictable (I knew the ultimate pair offs as soon as a certain flashback started; in fact, I would have delayed that part of the flashback until the last 15 minutes), and laugh out loud funny more times than not (of special note is the “land shark” sequence). In spirit is is probably more like Galaxy Quest, a gentle ribbing of comic book fantasies by people who aren’t all that familiar with the subject, but just enough to score a few points.

Thurman is very, very good in what is in reality a second lead. The pressure off her, she seems to flower. What’s funny is that in the background are actresses who are presented as much sexier than her. The character whom Vaughn is constantly trying to pick up, a bartender, is played by Margaret Anne Florence in what appears to be her first movie, and she is a total fox. And even the girl who plays teenaged Jenny (Tara Thompson) is “sexier” than Thurman. It’s nice to have them in the film, but for the sake of narrative tension the sexual emphasis should be on Thurman in costume.

Essentially, Super is a cartoon comedy, with some wised up elements. But I also like the cartoony special effects. They had speed. In the best special effects, especially when a superhero is throwing something big, like a truck, the object rarely move with the speed you’d expect. They are weighted, possibly because the animators want you to see and appreciate their handywork, even in defiance of physics. Here, such as during a catfight at the end, the effects move like lightning, as they should. Also, I really enjoyed Luke Wilson, who here acquires a sort of early Jack Nicholson every manquality, mixed with a Jack Lemmon nebbish. His closeups in the R-rating skirting sex scenes, with a powerful super girlfriend scraping the floorboards with the bed thanks to the power of her thrusts, are hilarious (and will put certain oldies in the audience in mind of  Wonder Warthog).

By the way, it’s clear that there was a scene deleted from the movie. When G-Girl rescues Matt from the Statue of Liberty, there is an obvious opportunity for a dialogue between them in a nearby park (this is before he knows who she really is), but we don’t see it, even though there are many photos on the ‘net taken of Uma in the park that day. Expect that scene to pop up on the DVD.

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