Director Craig Mazin has delivered a groundbreaking, whip-smart comic-book spoof that deftly deconstructs the genre without relying on surface-level parody . . . its called The Specials, and it came out nearly eight years ago. Superhero Movie, which is only Mazins second directorial effort, is everything his first film wasnt: predictable, flat, full of name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash. Drake & Joshs Drake Bell stars as Rick Riker, a hapless Tobey Maguire wannabe whos bitten by a genetically enhanced insect and becomes the Dragonfly; what ensues is a silly Spider-Man spoof thats ironically less witty than Sam Raimis source material. Note to the screenwriters: Its clear you think that jokes ending in the words MySpace, YouTube, or Wikipedia are automatically funny, but it just aint so. The best that can be said for Mazin is that hes still a step up from the demonic duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie), and Superhero Movie does deliver a small handful of laughs, mostly thanks to the presence of Jeffrey Tambor as a whacked-out doctor. But our standards for parody should be higher. — Luke Y. Thompson