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Reviews
The Crusaders #357: Experiment in Evil! (2008)
Saw this at Comic Con
I think it would be fair to say that this film is genuinely unique. I have never seen anything quite like it and I mean that in the best way possible. If at times, the amount of characters and plot points seems overwhelming, it is all part of the feel that this story has been going on for a long time and if you'd only read those other 356 issues, you'd know EXACTLY who everyone was and how they inter-related to each other. I found this to be a lot of the fun - keeping up with the, at times, breakneck comic book pace, even when I didn't fully understand what each character's powers were or how they were using them on each other. You kind of figure that out as you go. You get the feeling that these characters were around long before you got here and that, despite the fact that this would be a pivotal issue in the storyline of at least one major character, they will still be around for many issues to come after the film ends!
The use of framing devices and literal comic book frames to set the comic book tone works amazingly well. The sense that we are watching a comic book come to life is almost flawless. I am also impressed with some of the daring tone of the storyline. While much of the tone of the film is geared for kids (including old Batman television show-like Bams and Pows) and while we even see what appears to be a fairly young boy reading the comic, many of the themes are decidedly adult. While some issues such as domestic violence sit a bit uneasily, the overall theme which questions how acceptable it is to use evil to accomplish good is both powerful and ominously prescient for our times.