Critic Reviews

Archenemy is an absolute must-watch.

The movie's superhero-laden backbone is meant to support a deeper message. Adam Egypt Mortimer's Archenemy is a painful reminder of how society fails people, and bleeds colorful nuance and thematic messaging in every frame.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

What’s really great about Archenemy is that Mortimer never shies away from that darkness. By toeing the line of mental illness, he can expose the cost of comic book heroics and the evil being fought against.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

Small, imperfectly formed but quite entertaining all the same.

A critique of post-millennial journalism is one of several ideas raised but mostly abandoned in this genre pastiche, which never really coalesces despite some promising elements.

Mortimer, coming off his critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Daniel Isn't Real, never quite strikes a tone or a pace that suits his tale of a (potentially) fractured mind.

What you’re left with is a mixed bag of colorful, bizarro superhero world-building and threadbare characters that leaves the viewer with little-to-no interest in what happens next.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.