Super Directing, Not-so-Super Hero

By: KTCV

Hero Tomorrow is the story of an aspiring comic book writer named David. David works for his friend’s landscaping company by day. By night he works on the superhero character he is creating, Apama. 

    David lives with his friend, Greg and his father. David doesn’t pay rent, and this becomes a point of contention between the three men. David has a girlfriend, Robyn, who works as a knowledgeable clerk at Hero Tomorrow, a local comic shop and moonlights as an aspiring fashion designer. 

When David attends fashion events with Robyn, class issues become apparent as she alternately tries to inflate the importance of David’s position at the landscaping company and convince David to make a good impression so that someone in the design firm might hire him.

For the big design firm costume party, Robyn makes David an Apama costume. At the party, tensions come to a head between David and Robyn, and also David and roommate Greg. Greg berates David for not paying rent and not buying food, and this escalates into a physical altercation, embarrassing Robyn in front of her fashion industry peers. 

Following a breakup, David disappears, but not before stealing the money from Greg’s father’s secret stash. He spends his days in the Metroparks in his Apama costume, sustaining himself on a steady dose of weed and shrooms. Tripping, David convinces himself that he has become Apama, and fancies himself a vigilante. His first vigilante act? Beating up a bully who took some poor kid’s Halloween candy. 

Soon, Apama’s acts are becoming more and more serious, making local news. David is so blitzed most of the time that he doesn’t even remember doing them. (Cue mind-blowing plot twist.)

    This film was shot well. It has a very stylized look that reminds the viewer of a comic book. In one particular scene, David and Robyn are consummating their relationship in the comic book store (natch) after closing. The lights are off in the shop, and the windows are covered in dark, blue-toned comic pages and backlit, so you only see the silhouette of David and Robyn. An ingenious shot, and probably my favorite moment in the film. In another scene, David and Robyn go to see some local performance art. The story they see involves a giant squid who was captured frozen, sold to City Buddha. After thawing out, the squid meets a girl, and gets a job fact-checking for the Cleveland Post. An odd bit of random, but very entertaining. 

    Plotlines in the story are a bit muddled. I felt like the story jumped into convenient areas without much exposition. The characters were kind of flat and not entirely relatable. The actors portraying the characters didn’t really help the two dimensional characters with stilted dialogue and moments of overacting. However, there were a couple magical exceptions where everything works, and works well. Jocelyn Wrzosek, who portrayed Robyn, was generally good, with the exception of the overplayed tension between Robyn and her mother. Ray McNiece as Larry, the comic shop owner, was a fun character. Perren Hedderson played David, and while nice to look at, his delivery could use some Cleveland charisma.

    All in all, this film is gorgeously shot, but a bit more work on delivery and characterization could have saved the day. I give it 2.5 out of 5 ZOK!s.

Hero Tomorrow is available on DVD at HeroTomorrow.com