SPARKS (2013)

Studio:       Image Entertainment
Director:    Christopher Folino, Todd Burrows
Writer:       Christopher Folino
Producer:  Christopher Folino, Tyler Endicott, Michael A. Smith, James Sutton, Max Carlson, Eric D. Wilkinson
Stars:     Chase Williamson, Ashley Bell, William Katt, Jake Busey, Clint Howard, Clancy Brown

Review Score:

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Summary:

In the late 1940’s, a costumed vigilante rises from disgrace after his life is shattered by a notorious serial killer.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Rochester, New York – 1920 – Outside their home, pregnant mother Kelly Sherwood comforts her young son when they realize that her husband Kevin is in the act of committing another crime as serial killer Ring Master Jesus. A meteor hits that night, killing hundreds and exposing the survivors to deadly radioactivity. The thirteen survivors develop their own forms of radioactive mutations and become collectively known as “The Rochester 13.” Kevin Sherwood is rumored to have been one of the Rochester 13, but he is presumed dead when a suicide note and charred body are discovered.

28 Years Later – Presumed to be a copycat killer modeled after the crimes of serial murderer Matanza, former vigilante Ian Sparks arrives at The Daily Chronicle newspaper to tell his story to editor Gordon Eldridge. Harrison Docherty records Sparks’ admission.

At the age of six, Ian and his parents were stopped at a railroad crossing for a passing train. Along policeman named Archer chased after criminal Jacob Driver, causing Driver’s car to knock the Sparks family vehicle into the passing train. The resulting explosion caused a tanker to spill its contents of a chemical called Red-G. Ian was exposed and his parents died. As a result of the tragedy, Ian trained to become a vigilante hero named Sparks while living with his grandmother. Archer kept a watchful eye over the boy’s progress. Around the same time, other vigilantes known as “supers” began cropping up around the city to combat crime.

Sparks falls for female super Lady Heavenly and they begin a partnership and a romance. Sparks and Heavenly are horrified by a crime scene where they rescue a young boy. That scene was the last in a series of eleven bloody murders committed that night by the serial killer Matanza, who eluded capture.

Sparks stages a fake police report with the help of several officers and leads Heavenly to what is actually a romantic rooftop setting. Using his mother’s old ring, Sparks proposes and Heavenly accepts. Hearing a gunshot, they return to the street and find one of the officers shot dead. Sparks and Heavenly follow a blood trail into the sewer and discover Matanza’s secret lair. Matanza shoots Sparks in the head. When Sparks recovers, he learns that Matanza assaulted Heavenly before her former partner and flame Sledge arrived to rescue her and kill Matanza. The event marked the end of Sparks’ relationship with Heavenly and renewed her romance with Sledge.

A mystery man arrives at the newspaper building and the power goes out. Eldridge refuses to leave his office. Sparks takes Docherty up to the roof to continue his story. The mystery man kills Eldridge.

Thugs kill Ian’s grandmother. Disgraced as a vigilante, Ian hangs himself with a noose, but somehow survives. Archer injects Sparks with Red-G and kidnaps him from the hospital. Intent on reigniting Ian’s passion for heroism, Archer begins retraining Sparks and recruits him to help bring down Driver, the man whose car crashed into Ian’s parents’ vehicle on the day that they died.

Archer introduces Sparks to two of the Rochester 13. Cain has explosive fire powers. Dawn is a shapeshifter. Dawn takes a liking to Sparks and uses her ability to morph into Heavenly to fulfill Ian’s fantasies, as well as to take advantage of his broken heart.

The foursome stages a plan to take down Driver at his hotel. When the plan backfires, Cain explodes a truck full of dynamite and brings down the entire building. Ian is seemingly killed in the blast. Afterwards, Dawn uses her power to impersonate Driver and withdraw money from Driver’s bank account.

3 Days Later – Sparks realizes that Archer’s goal was merely to rob driver and had nothing to do with justice. Sparks is furious with Archer over the lives of children lost in the hotel explosion. Archer tells Ian that he was the one who pulled him from the wreckage the day his parents were killed and both of them were doused with the Red-G chemical. However, Archer was trying to rob Archer on that day as well, and he inadvertently caused Driver to crash into Ian’s parents’ car.

Some time later, Ian finds Dawn working as a prostitute. Ian learns that Dawn was the unborn child being carried by Kelly Sherwood on the night that the comet struck back in 1920. Ian uses Dawn to impersonate Heavenly again for his own fantasies, and also to take money from a businessman who thinks he is paying to have sex with the real Lady Heavenly. When the true Heavenly discovers what Ian is doing, she angrily confronts and threatens him. Ian learns that Heavenly and Sledge are engaged.

A man named Mr. Prather visits Ian on Sledge’s behalf. Prather tells Ian that Heavenly has been unable to consummate her relationship to Sledge since the incident in Mantanza’s lair. Prather arranges for Ian to send Dawn as Heavenly to a motel where Sledge intends to have sex with her.

At the motel, Ian watches from outside as two Sledges arrive. Ian hears Dawn scream and then a gunshot. When Ian enters the motel room, he finds one of the Sledges filming Dawn’s dead body while the other Sledge strangles him from behind. When Ian regains consciousness, Ian realizes he has been framed for Dawn’s murder. As the police arrive on scene, Ian escapes.

Ian returns to Matanza’s lair in the sewer and finds the film that was recorded on the night he and Heavenly were attacked. When Ian watches the footage of Matanza shooting him in the head, it dawns on him that he has survived all of these fatal experiences because his exposure to the Red-G chemical gave him the power to come back from the dead.

Ian takes the film to Heavenly’s apartment and leaves it there for her along with the ring Ian used to propose. Heavenly watches the film and learns that Sledge is actually Matanza’s son and he was there the night that she and Ian were attacked. Heavenly reads the note Ian left for her and prepares to meet with him. Sledge later finds the note.

Impersonating Heavenly, shapeshifter Matanza stabs Ian to death at the rendezvous point and drops him in the sewer. When Heavenly arrives, Matanza impersonates Ian and shoots Heavenly in the chest.

Back on the newspaper building rooftop, Sledge is revealed to be the mystery man when he attacks Ian. During the fight between Sledge and Ian, Matanza arrives. Matanza fires his gun at Ian, knocking Sparks off the roof and killing him when he hits the pavement below. Sledge attacks his father when he learns that Matanza killed Heavenly. Matanza ends up killing Sledge.

Matanza returns to the street and confronts Ian as Sparks recovers. Knowing that he will be resurrected again, Ian lights dynamite sticks strapped to his back, blowing himself up along with Matanza. A severed finger is later seen regenerating on the ground near the explosion. Heavenly ends up surviving her bullet wound thanks to the titanium wedding band worn around her neck. Matanza’s true identity as Kevin Sherwood is exposed in the newspaper by Docherty.

6 Months Later – Mumbai, India – Knowing that Red-G allows Archer to regenerate, Driver holds him hostage in a warehouse, biting off appendages only for them to grow back and be bitten off again. Ian Sparks arrives, forgiving Driver for his parents’ deaths, as Archer was the man ultimately responsible. Thinking Sparks is there to rescue him, Archer is horrified to discover that Ian is actually in India to resupply Driver with Red-G so that the torture can continue.

Back home, Ian recreates the rooftop proposal scene for Lady Heavenly. Ian and Heavenly share a passionate kiss.

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Review:

When an independent production tries to make a masked vigilante movie for the film world equivalent of pocket change, you have to wonder if the filmmakers missed the memo that it is no longer the 1990’s.  Matte paintings and hand-sewn costumes may have been passable in something like “Doctor Mordrid,” but audiences accustomed to “Avengers,” “Iron Man,” and “The Dark Knight Rises” are no longer desperate for comic-book movies like they once were, and their tolerance for anything less than $200 million state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line delivery has dwindled to the size of a peanut.

Not only does “Sparks” ignore this notion and forge ahead anyway, but its story is also set in 1948.  Cowls, Capes, and a period piece to boot on a shoestring budget?  Based on behind-the-scenes factors alone, “Sparks” has no right to be any good at all.  Yet if you can look past tearing seams in the visual effects and an occasionally spotty structure, a solid story and a splendid cast make “Sparks” a surprisingly entertaining superhero alternative to summertime Cineplex fare.

When a chain reaction crash propels the family car into an exploding tanker train, six-year-old Ian Sparks finds himself washed in a bath of mysterious chemicals along with an amalgam of various superhero origins.  The death of his parents provides a Batman-like inspiration to train for a life of vigilantism.  His Aunt May-esque grandmother offers balance as a matronly conscience.  Sparks does not have any real powers that he is aware of, but he lives in a 1940’s noir version of the “Kick-Ass” world, where a handful of well-intentioned do-gooders don disguises to fight crime.

Just as it seems like the setup cannot start off any more derivative, Sparks’ path deviates from that of a traditional costumed hero after he suffers a devastating fall from the limelight.  Teamed with the love of his life and partner in crimefighting Lady Heavenly, Ian’s alter ego unravels when he is shot in the head and Heavenly is viciously assaulted by the brutal serial killer Matanza.  To make matters worse, Heavenly’s former flame Sledge saves the day, completing Sparks’ public shaming as a total failure.

His love lost and his hero days behind him, Sparks occupies his post-tragedy days with suicidal aspirations and dreams of vengeance.  He is unafraid to torture evildoers.  He even literally becomes a pimp of sorts.  Sparks is a flawed hero in the classic Marvel Comics sense, though his descent into despair goes much deeper, making his arc more understandable and his subsequent redemption that much more dramatic.

“Sparks” teases R-rated themes of sexual assault, prostitution, and serial murder, but these ideas are suggested with tasteful restraint and only employed to deepen the story while grounding it in gravity beyond punching fedora-wearing bank robbers in the face.  The film is unrated, but does nothing salacious with its darker tones to earn itself any rating higher than PG-13.

The elephant in the room with “Sparks” is its visual effects.  This is a film with super powers set in the 1940’s and it has only one studio location and a pair of green screens to pull it all off.  Apparently, just two artists spent many months creating over 500 digitally-enhanced shots.  While that makes their feat impressive, it doesn’t change the fact that the movie has blatantly obvious green screen seams, some sketchy crocodile villain makeup, and more than one explosion that is less than spectacular.  Things are about as convincing as they can be given the circumstances, but buying into the movie’s believability requires a lot of looking the other way.

Luckily, a highly respectable assembly of onscreen talent teeters that seesaw in the other direction.  Chase Williamson is good, although not completely on point for putting Sparks in the ranks of big league comic book icons.  Williamson’s forte is his understated Topher Grace-like demeanor and delivery, which worked perfectly in “John Dies at the End” (review here), but his subtlety misses some of the flair required for creating a colorful hero.

Ashley Bell of “The Last Exorcism” (review here) is fashionably gorgeous in period perfect spiral-slide hair curls and femme fatale eyelashes.  Clint Howard, Jake Busey, and William Katt appear just enough for their personalities to never become undue distractions while Clancy Brown rounds it all out with the reliability he brings to every appearance he ever makes.

The filmmakers would likely be among the first to agree that “Sparks” is rough around the edges.  The clichéd way to summarize it would be to say that like the character himself, “Sparks” puts up a scrappy fight to rise above the black X’s preventing it from fighting head-to-head with the Big Boy competition.  The movie lacks high value realism, eye-popping visuals, and the big budget polish that its counterparts have.  But what it misses in production quality, “Sparks” makes up for with heart and spirit from a plainly passionate cast and crew.  “Sparks” won’t make anyone forget “The Incredible Hulk” or “Man of Steel” anytime soon, but its well-presented story might catch the eye of those willing to take a chance on a small-budget indie.

Review Score:  75

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