The Cast of Characters:
	Zoom (Tim Allen). Real name: Jack Shepard. The Last Superhero. Actually, he's not really, but everyone acts like he is. Assigned the daunting task of training kids to fight his evil brother, but can't really decide whether to care or not.
	Marsha Holloway (Courteney Cox). Scientist of unclear specialty, and resident geek. Admires Zoom, but finds his secret identity Jack quite hard to bear. Can't decide whether to be important, or secondary comic relief.
	Dr. Grant (Chevy Chase). Nobel prize winning scientist, primary comic relief, and supposedly the smartest character in the movie. And yet, he never gets the sense to up and quit from his abusive boss, who is...
	General Larraby (Rip Torn). Evil general without the slightest capacity for reason or tact. Loves to collect children and dose them with radiation.
	Dylan West (Michael Cassidy). Like: The Invisible Woman. Sans: Cool force fields. The leader of the team, but realizes it much later than the rest of us. Until then, he fills the requisite role of the Rebel.
	Summer Jones (Kate Mara). Like: Jean Grey. Sans: Any remotely interesting trait. The anti-social girl, who for some reason decides a superhero team is right for her. Also has the power to create deus ex machinas.
	Tucker Williams (Spencer Breslin). Like: Mister Fantastic. Sans: The brains. Extremely sensitive about his weight, yet always eating junk food. Mostly exists to close the age gap between Summer and Cindy.
	Cindy Collins (Ryan Newman). Like: The Hulk. Sans: The eloquence and charm. A spoiled brat with super strength. Acts malevolent throughout the entire film, which is somehow supposed to endear her to the audience.

My professors were generous enough to give my Master's thesis on comic book superheroes a good grade. So, I decided to celebrate by recapping a really bad superhero movie.

Actually, it's a really bad kids' superhero movie. No—make that a really bad kids' superhero comedy. Oh yes, be afraid. I've probably already lost all but the most masochistic of readers, and I haven't even mentioned the presence of Tim Allen yet. Fans of Home Improvement might draw some comfort from seeing their favorite star suffer along with them, but I am not so fortunate.

Zoom: Academy for Superheroes is a movie that should not be viewed in a single sitting, if you prefer your brain not dripping out of your ears. It's a script so bad that only a flamethrower could improve it. It's based on the graphic novel Zoom's Academy for the Super Gifted by Jason Lethcoe, which should let you know right away what we're getting here: Basically, it's a teen/pre-teen X-Men where all the lead superheroes are brats, and Professor X is kind of a dick.

A lot of reviewers compared this movie to Galaxy Quest. However, the only constant I've seen in these comparisons is Galaxy Quest = good, Zoom = bad (hey, no argument from me). People were probably hoping that if Allen managed to skillfully make fun of one beloved genre, maybe he could pull it off again. Unfortunately, those hopes were quickly dashed. Unless you were hoping for 83 minutes of sheer pain, that is.

Some audience members (particularly those on the IMDb boards) have said the film deserves a break, because it's just a kids' movie. This may be an explanation for why it turned out so bad, but it sure isn't an excuse. Even a kids' movie needs to have a coherent plot.

Also, according to the DVD case, this one got a PG rating partly for "mild action". When one of the main weaknesses of the film is spelled out right there in the MPAA rating, you know you're in for it.

So, get ready for a movie that, at the time of this writing, has a 2% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And even that's too kind.

The only nice touch in this alleged comic book movie occurs in the first few seconds, when the Revolution Studios logo turns into a comic publisher's logo, with "20 ¢" written underneath it. It's all downhill from here.

And that's 20 cents more than this movie is worth.

Here come the credits, done in comic book-style animation. We're introduced to Team Zenith, a team of young superheroes. And already the film begins to let things slide. I'll be charitable and call the art half-decent, but I can't say the animation is anything but shoddy. Bad guys fly through wildly changing panels, keeping exactly the same poses the whole way. The backgrounds look like they were animated by a kid with ADD, who couldn't even be bothered to line them up straight, or in any particular order. And of course, if you're making this kind of animation, you can't leave out the obligatory "BLAM!" and "Meanwhile..." panels.

The expository voice-over provided by Courteney Cox is not doing anything to save the first minute of the movie. She tells us about the team fighting evil (been there, seen that), "led by Captain Zoom and his brother Concussion". Not that this "Captain" thing will become in any way important, but somebody must have thought it sounded cool and "hero-y".

Makes you long for the understated days of Adam West, doesn't it?

"The team saved many lives," Courteney assures us. By the looks of it, they did this primarily by punching villains and catching pretty women. Hey, I have a brother myself, so I have a feeling I know how these things went: —Ugh, an ugly one, Concussion, your turn to catch her. —What? I caught the governor last week! And you're the one with super speed, you go catch her! —Now, listen, if you... oh. Problem just solved itself.

NOW TAKE YOUR HAND OFF MY ASS!!

So, wait, he can use his hands to communicate with dolphins? Awesome!

Then comes one of the movie's big annoyances/identifiers: the Team Zenith logo, which bounces around and makes irritating noises between scenes. It's surrounded by metal rings, and whenever you see this thing, be prepared for these rings to loudly rotate with whooshing noises. And sadly, the filmmakers seem to be under the impression that this gets better with repetition.

"Come on, why do we have to swear our oath on top of a skyscraper? It's freezing up here!"

Courteney quickly adds "Dr. Grant" to the list of people on the team, and here we get a drawing of Chevy Chase in his better years. The drawing is... we settled on half-decent, didn't we? Okay then, half-decent. Especially if you compare it to the actual Mr. Chase, whom we're about to see.

He's hitting rock bottom, and you're not.

Next up on the Expos-o-Matic: "The Gamma-13 Ionizer", or so the panel says. Courteney's VO explains that the government wanted to improve the powers of Team Zenith using "gamma-13 radiation". Would the writer of Zoom please come to the information desk? There's a message for him. It reads: "Just adding a number to something does not make it original."

Seriously, you have to allow for the slim chance that one or two people who know comic books are coming to see your superhero movie, and might recall at least one other famous character given powers by gamma radiation. Come on! It's not like gamma is the only letter in the Greek alphabet. Hulk smash puny writers!

What's more, the government obviously never heard of the adage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". But actually, that's true of the government in real life, so I'll just be quiet now. Regardless, that's the kind of movie we're getting here: anyone in a position of authority is automatically bad.

...available only at the Sharper Image!

As a result of this little "gamma-13" experiment, "Zoom got faster and stronger", and we see him doing nothing worthwhile with his new powers, apart from running past artsy drawings of stopwatches.

But there was a catch: "The Gamma turned Concussion to the dark side." The Gamma is coming! The Evil Letter, run for your lives! But really, that's one of the dumbest villain origin stories ever (and I've read the origin of Ten-Eyed Man). No explanation, no rationale. Just, one second he's good, the next he's evil. Maybe we should all avoid hospitals with x-ray machines, just in case the radiation suddenly turns all the patients to the dark side.

"He turned on his own team," the VO explains, because hey, that's what evil people do. The next panels show Zoom running around in circles, thus creating a tornado-like thingy. Well, at least they're not ripping off just one superhero anymore—this whirlwind gimmick must be at least as old as the Flash (and I'm talking about the Golden Age Flash here, people).

The audience is not really told what this tornado thing is supposed to accomplish, but "Zoom lost his powers" because of it. Plot point! And then Concussion's last panel has him shout, "I'll be back!" So it seems like the tornado banished Concussion in some way. It's not really clear.

"I'm just going to pick up a pack of cigs in a parallel dimension! Don't start the movie without me!"

Finally, we fade to real-life footage, and a more coherent style of narration (comparatively speaking). A helicopter flies over a desert, accompanied by blaring military horns. It heads towards a mountain, and the pilot radios, "We're coming up now. Prepare to deactivate cloaking device." Which causes the mountain to shimmer in all colors of the rainbow, and reveal a secret base built inside the rock. Er, he said "prepare to", not "do it now". But considering the average IQ of the employees we're about to meet, it's a wonder anyone found the switch at all.

And here comes the title: Zoom: Academy for Superheroes. Can anyone find anything wrong with this title? I'm not too sure myself, but it seems a little like naming your movie Professor X: School for Mutants. [Or perhaps Mr. Raditch: Junior High for Sex Addicts. —Albert]