10 best superhero films for people who don’t like superhero films

Captain America: Brave New World hits cinemas this week, and it isn’t merely tasked with kickstarting a floundering Marvel Cinematic Universe.

It also stands as a sequel to three of the better movies in the MCU, two of which stand up as good films in their own right. We’d go so far as to say that both Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are enjoyable movies irrespective of your view on superheroes.

Captain America: The First Avenger is a rollicking war movie in which our plucky hero takes on the Wehrmacht (or a fantastical offshoot of it, at any rate). Captain America: The Winter Soldier, meanwhile, is a tense, paranoid political thriller that just so happens to feature men who can leap 10 feet into the air and punch holes through metal.

We’d recommend either of those first two Captain America films to non-superhero fans, but they’re not alone in their crossover appeal. There’s a select list of superhero films that are downright enjoyable regardless of their spandex factor.

Which of these broadly appealing, genre-splicing superhero movies is your favourite? Be a hero and share your thoughts!

Chronicle

Several films on this list purport to take a more grounded approach to the superhero genre, but Chronicle is arguably the most convincing in its splicing together of the fantastical with the quotidian. Key to its success is an indie movie found footage approach, as our three relatable teen protagonists catalogue their discovery and subsequent mastery of amazing telekinetic powers. When the more troubled member of the trio starts to unravel, it leads to an epic yet somehow all-too-relatable standoff.

Watchmen

Writer Alan Moore is no fan of superheroes, having come to the belated conclusion that they’re little more than juvenile power fantasies marketed at an infantilised adult male audience. The so-called heroes of his ’80s masterpiece, Watchmen, are either burnouts, psychos, or godlike beings completely alienated from humanity. Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation is a blunt instrument that misses much of the nuance of the source material, but it still hits most of the story’s central beats, resulting in an ambitious intertextual whodunnit.

V for Vendetta

More Moore here. Alan Moore has come to loathe both superheroes and the very idea of comic book adaptations, so it’s both fitting and somewhat ironic that his work is represented twice on this list. V for Vendetta arguably veers away from the source material even more than Watchmen, but it remains a highly entertaining dystopian thriller in its own right. Hugo Weaving plays V, a mysterious masked figure who inspires a violent popular insurrection against an authoritarian future government.

Joker

The Dark Knight may get a lot of plaudits for its crossover appeal, but it’s also arguably the best superhero movie ever made, so it seems pointless to include it here. Rather, we’ll recommend Joker. Not only is it not a superhero movie (if anything, it’s a supervillain movie), it takes more direct inspiration from the films of Martin Scorsese than any DC lore. Scorsese, of course, is famously no lover of superhero movies, and you’d have to feel he’d appreciate this as the fan letter it was intended to be. The less said about its sequel, however, the better...

Unbreakable

Bruce Willis plays a laconic security guard who realises he may be built for greater things after he survives a deadly train crash. Unbreakable is a superhero movie that deftly cordons off the sillier tropes of the genre, acknowledging them only through the shifty figure of Samuel L. Jackson’s comic book-loving Elijah Price. The rest of the film is a moody crime thriller heightened by a couple of signature M. Night Shyamalan twists.

The Crow

The film that saw the tragic death of its star Brandon Lee (son of Bruce) during a stunt gone wrong turns out to be a suitably macabre piece of work. How many superhero movies start with the murder of its hero and his lover? When rock musician Eric Draven is given a chance at payback from beyond the grave, he becomes a black-clad avenging angel who manages to out-emo even Robert Pattinson’s Batman.

Super

These days James Gunn is at the very heart of the mainstream superhero movie-making machine, having made three major Marvel movies before taking creative control of DC’s cinematic output. Back in 2010, however, he bit that hand that would go on to feed him by making Super. This R-rated spoof dares to highlight the dark motivation of real life vigilantes. Its costumed ‘heroes’ are mentally unhinged thugs, suffering from an unhealthy bloodlust and harmful delusions of grandeur.

Kick-Ass

Four years before his rude, crude and irreverent take on the spy movie in Kingsman, Matthew Vaughn did more or less the same thing for the superhero genre. Adapting yet another Mark Millar comic, Kick-Ass tells the tale of a community of dysfunctional masked vigilantes. Our titular hero (played by Aaron Johnson) is a wimpy kid with an almost preternatural tolerance for pain, while a young Chloë Grace Moretz plays Hit-Girl, a foul mouthed tween with a gift for extreme violence.

The Rocketeer

This was the film that got Joe Johnston the job of directing the first Captain America movie, which we mentioned in the intro. Nodding less to superhero comics and more to the 1930s serial films that immediately preceded them, The Rocketeer offers the kind of swashbuckling period adventure that will appeal to any fans of the Indiana Jones franchise. Yes, our hero is a man who can fly, but he’s also a screw-up of a stunt pilot who bungles his way into a dubious Nazi plot.

The Incredibles

Yes, The Incredibles is undoubtedly Pixar’s take on the superhero genre. But this was the computer animation pioneer at the absolute height of its powers, which means that the movie draws from a much wider range of sources. It’s got the technicolour pizazz of a ’60s spy caper, the sharp family dynamics of a classic rom-com, and the kinetic set pieces of a killer action movie. The fact that the core characters are members of a super-powered family is almost by the by.

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