Sunday, December 25, 2011

101. Ice Age


Title: Ice Age
Genre: Animation, Adventure, Comedy
Year: 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012

Summary:

Ice Age (2002): Sid, a sloth who never stops talking is left behind sleeping while everyone else begins the journey to the south. Awaking, he meets Manny, a mammoth who travels to the north, and decides to follow him. When a humans camp is attacked by tigers, a woman takes her baby and jumps into a river and falls off a waterfall. Before she disappears, the baby is rescued by Manny and Sid. The two animals decide to search for the father and return the baby to him. Diego, one of the tigers that attacked the humans, comes also claiming the baby.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006): Manny, Sid, and Diego are currently living in a large valley surrounded by an enormously high ice wall on all sides. When a water park begins to form, the trio discovers that the ice wall is actually a wall that is barely holding a massive body of water that could flood the valley to nearly a mile underwater. A vulture tells them that there is a boat at the other end of the valley that may save them all, but they only have 3 days to make it or die. Manny is having trouble facing the fact that he may be the last mammoth left. Along the way, they meet Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she is a possum, and her possum brothers Crash and Eddie. As they begin to travel together, Manny learns, with help from Diego and Sid, that having this new mammoth with them, may not be as bad as Manny makes it out to be while they try to escape the oncoming and continually threatening flood. During their journey, Scrat the sabre-toothed squirrel has his own adventures that eventually leads to something else entirely.

Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009): Life begins to change for Manny and his friends: Scrat is still on the hunt to hold onto his beloved acorn, while finding a possible romance in a female sabre-toothed squirrel named Scratte. Manny and Ellie, having since become an item, are expecting a baby, which leaves Manny anxious to ensure that everything is perfect for when his baby arrives. Diego is fed up with being treated like a house-cat and ponders the notion that he is becoming too laid-back. Sid becomes jealous of Manny and Ellie and begins to wish for a family of his own, and so steals some dinosaur eggs which leads to Sid ending up in a strange underground world where his herd must rescue him, while dodging dinosaurs and facing danger left and right, and meeting up with an insane one-eyed weasel known as Buck who hunts dinosaurs intently.

Ice Age 4: Continental Age (2012): One of filmdom's most beloved trios - "Ice Age's" Manny, Diego, and Sid - embark upon their greatest adventure after cataclysm sets an entire continental drift. Separated from the rest of the herd, they use an iceberg as a makeshift ship, which launches them on an epic seafaring quest. Manny and the gang are challenged like never before to become heroes and do the impossible, as they encounter exotic sea creatures, explore a brave new world, and battle ruthless pirates. And Scrat's reunion with his cursed nut catapults him to places no prehistoric squirrel has gone before.

Short Films:
Gone Nutty (2002): It begins with Scrat (Chris Wedge) returning to a huge tree, hollowed out and filled to the brim with acorns. There is one more empty spot in the middle of the acorns where Scrat tries to stuff the last acorn he brought with him (he first tries to slam it in like he did in the opening of the first film, but he seems to remember what would happen if he did, so he places it in gently instead). However it pops back out when his back is turned and after two more tries at getting it in place - both with the acorn popping out again - Scrat gets frustrated and stomps it into place, unwittingly blowing the entire tree, and every acorn along with Scrat is sent sliding down the side of a mountain. The acorns and Scrat go into free fall.
A short musical scene follows (to the tune of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz), with Scrat collecting acorns as he falls, turning them into 3 things (a bed, a skyboard and a giant ball). Eventually Scrat collects and forms a 3-D sphere with the acorns, but then (with Scrat on top of it) it tilts upside down so Scrat and the acorns finally fall to the icy land down below. There is one lone acorn (presumably the one he was trying to stuff into the tree) left in the atmosphere. Scrat, stuck in the snow, is only able to free his arms before the acorn impacts right between his eyes, as fast as a meteorite. The extreme force results in continental drift, shaping the Earth's continents (probably Pangea) into their present day form and trapping Scrat on the original spot from the center of the impact. When Scrat digs out the acorn, he finds it has been charred and thus crumbled into ash. Disappointed and defeated, he puts on the remaining acorn cap as a hat.

No Time for Nuts (2006): Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel (a fictional animal from the Ice Age film series), while trying to find a place to hide his acorn, finds a buried time machine next to the ice-encased skeletal body of a human time traveler. He accidentally activates the machine, sending the acorn away. Scrat gets mad and tries to beat up the time machine and it sends him to the Middle Ages. Finding the acorn wedged under a rock, Scrat sees the Sword in the Stone and decides to use it as a lever to move the rock. He pulls out the sword but then finds himself under attack by a group of unseen archers, and uses the sword to block the arrows fired by the archers. He frees the acorn and takes it and the time machine and races off to find cover, only to hide in the barrel of a cannon. The cannon fires him into the path of hundreds of incoming arrows. The time machine teleports the acorn mid-flight and Scrat just barely manages to activate the machine again for himself.
He materializes in an arena in Ancient Rome. Scrat reaches for his acorn, but is dragged off when his tail is caught on a passing chariot pulled by a horse. Scrat manages to free himself just as a fanfare sounds. He thinks it is victory music introduces himself to the crowd like a triumphant gladiator, proudly holding up his acorn. Then he hears the growl of a lion coming from the tunnel behind him. He activates the time machine again, and lands on a field of ice. He is overjoyed, thinking he is home, but he soon learns he's really in 1912 when he sees the RMS Titanic heading straight towards him. The time machine is activated after impact, and Scrat finds himself in the first Ice Age movie, where he encounters himself and fights himself for his acorn. (Manny, Sid, Diego, and Roshan made a cameo watching the fight.) The acorn is teleported again, much to the distress of both Scrats.
The time traveling Scrat is sent to many dangerous situations where he would have been killed if he had not activated the time machine in time; firstly to the bottom of a launching rocket, Scrat desperately activates the time machine again, and is sent to a jewelery store, and is caught in red laser, and then he is sent to a girl's locker room where he is hit by a roller brush, and then he sent to the French Revolution where he appears under the falling blade of a guillotine, during Benjamin Franklin's famous kite flying experiment, in front of a wrecking ball, in front of Hiroshima, on the tracks in front of a speeding train, and in front of Michelangelo's David (this actually isn't a dangerous situation, but Scrat displays discomfort.). Frustrated, Scrat punches the machine, which sends him into a strange realm of floating timepieces. Scrat spots his acorn and grabs it, just before being drawn into a wormhole along with his acorn and the time machine.
The wormhole lands Scrat in front of an enormous oak tree. Overjoyed at the sight of so many acorns, he tosses away his time traveling acorn, which lands on and activates the time machine. Before it can fire again, Scrat smashes the time machine. Scrat attempts to remove the nuts from the tree, but soon discovers that it is only a sculpture, with a plaque on it reading "Here Stood the Last Oak Tree." Scrat realizes he's in the far future, where oak trees (and acorns) are extinct. He realizes that the acorn he brought with him is the only one real one around. He makes a dash for it, but the time machine manages to fire one last time, transporting the acorn right out of his paws right before the time machine collapsed into pieces. Stranded in the acorn-less future, Scrat lets out a scream of frustration, ending the film.
Then the lost acorn ends up floating behind the credits of the film.

Surviving Sid (2008): Sid, the Sloth, takes a school of children out on a camping trip from home, only to find that in typical Sid style, he is not a very good guide and the children he takes with him don't have a very good time. Scrat makes a small cameo appearance in the short, he has swallowed his nut and is struggling to keep it down, in true Scrat style he coughs it up and it is stolen from him. The camping trip leaves some of the children somewhat traumatized. Sid tries to pick a flower, but somehow this has led to a tree falling, which then hits a rock, which causes a chain reaction and hits a series of larger rocks, until eventually hitting a large iceberg. The iceberg then carves out a u-shaped valley, which Sid later names the Grand Canyon. Afterwards the kids get so annoyed with Sid that it ends with them tying him up. At the end of the short movie (20,000 years later in the present day) it shows a father and son beaver looking over the Grand Canyon with the son asking who made it. The father replies "Nature or a being with infinite wisdom."

Scrat's Continental Crack-up Part 1 (2010): Scrat sniffs an ice cap looking for a place where his acorn would be safe. When Scrat hits the ice it starts to crack, causing him to quickly push ice into the hole to prevent trouble. When Scrat merely touches the ice with the tip of his acorn, it somehow ends up breaking the entire mountain below the ice cap. Scrat gets his acorn and falls into the rift, passing by the weasel Buck mounting his dinosaur nemesis Rudy while he goes, and ends passing through all of Earth's layers, eventually arriving at a hovering, metallic sphere which composes the inner core. While pursuing his acorn, Scrat makes the core spin and breaks Pangea into the contemporary continents, Australia is shown forming, giraffes are created when Africa is separated from Pangea, which stretches their necks , and making the boot-shaped Italian Peninsula kick a nearby island (accompanied by a scream of "GOAL!") during its formation. Scrat eventually trips and starts bumping between the sphere and the solid outer core, creating a Scrat-like Moai, a Scrat Sphinx which loses its nose, and four Scrat faces on Mount Rushmore. Scrat later picks up balance up and grabs his acorn, and ends up spinning in the core until he's thrown out of the rift into the upper atmosphere. While falling, Scrat positions his body as if he would fall into the sea, but ends up landing on a piece of ice, which breaks separating Scrat from his acorn as he lets off another scream of frustration.

Scrat's Continental Crack-up Part 2 (2011): Scrat is riding an iceberg, when he sees an island. He climbs on to the island, where he sees a skeleton. He examines it and realizes it is pointing to a nut under the sea. Scrat uses a large stone to weigh him down the nut. When he pulls out the nut, it reveals to be a map to a giant pile of acorns. Scrat, excited with his find, encounters a swordfish skeleton. The skeleton pulls Scrat up to a pirate ship, where he encounters some pirates including a Gigantopithecus, a boar, a rabbit, a kangaroo, a blue-footed booby, an elephant seal, and a female saber-toothed tiger. The pirates make Scrat dance alongside a tied up Manny, Sid, and Diego.

Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (2011): In the middle of decorating for the holiday season, Sid accidentally destroys Manny's favourite decorations. Sid, convinced by Manny that he is now on the Santa's naughty list, takes off with Crash, Eddie and Peaches for the North Pole to get back on the Santa's good side. When on the North Pole, Sid and his crew accidentally destroy Santa's Workshop. When Manny, Ellie and Diego worried over Peaches safety, arrive to North Pole, they must come together and save Christmas.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

100. Inkheart


Title: Inkheart
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy, Family
Year: 2008

Summary: The story begins with Mortimer Folchart and his wife, Resa reading the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" to their baby daughter Meggie. As Mo reads the story, a red velvet hood appears as a narrator explains that people known as "Silver Tongues" are born with the gift that whenever they read a story out loud, the story becomes real, and that some of the gifted people are completely unaware of their power.
12 years later, Mortimer and Meggie are in the European countrysides looking for a book. Mo has learned of his gifts, and nine years prior, Resa had vanished, much to the distress of her extended family. Hearing the calling of books from a bookstore one day, Mo ventures inside. He finds the book Inkheart and is overwhelmed with a mixture of fear and joy.
At the same time, Dustfinger, a character from Inkheart appears and attempts to persuade Mo to read him back into the book. Mo refuses to do so and hastily escapes with Meggie and travels to Italy to pay a visit to Meggie's great aunt Elinor Loredan. Elinor accuses Resa of running off, which upsets Meggie, but the two make amends when expressing their mutual passion for valuable books, and Elinor lets Meggie stay in her library to read. Dustfinger appears again, but this time having informed the book's villain Capricorn and bringing his minion Basta to capture Mo and his family and take back the book, in the meantime destroying Elinor's valuable collection of books.
The trio are taken to Capricorn's castle and imprisoned in the stables, which house various creatures from storybooks, such as the ticking Crocodile from Peter Pan, flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, and the title character of The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as the minotaur from the story of Theseus and a unicorn. Mo explains his gift to Meggie and Elinor, stating that when he reads a person out of a book, someone from the real world is sent into it, hence the disappearance of his wife. They are abruptly taken to meet with Capricorn, and meet his current reader Darius, whose perpetual stutter had caused those he had read out of the book to only come halfway out of the story, with various deformities and the words of the stories written on their faces. Capricorn breaks his promise to Dustfinger to have him read back into the book, and throws it onto the fire, burning it. In his despair, Dustfinger leaves the group and runs to the kitchen, where he learns that one of the servant girls, a trusted friend of his who is constantly attempting to escape, is in fact Mo's lost wife Resa, whose halfway transition from the book she was trapped in has left her without a voice. He gives her the access to escape and departs.
After reading from The Arabian Nights and giving Capricorn a stash of treasure, one of Ali Baba's thieves, Farid, is summoned from the story and joins the storyteller and his family in imprisonment. Dustfinger opts not to tell Mo that his wife is in the village and prompts a quick escape using the famous cyclone from The Wizard of Oz. After they escape, Meggie offers the idea that only the author of Inkheart, Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent (a fictional character, unrelated to the Italian writer Beppe Fenoglio)) may have access to a copy of the rare-to-find book.
After learning of the author's location and traveling to his town, Elinor decides to leave to recover what is left of her book collection. Dustfinger stays behind with Farid partly in order to teach him how to juggle fire, but also due to the fact he is afraid of learning his fate at the end of the book. Fenoglio cannot resist approaching his creation and inadvertently blurts out that Dustfinger dies in the novel while saving his marten Gwin. This devastates the fire juggler, who states that the writer is not his god, and he can deem whatever fate he chooses. While Mo attempts to find a way of reading Resa out of the book, Dustfinger has no choice but to confess that she was at Capricorn's village, prompting him and Mo to take Fenoglio's car and leave Meggie behind with Fenoglio. They discover that Farid had stowed away in the car's trunk, and take him along at his insistence. Elsewhere, Elinor has a change of heart and does not take the train back to Italy.
Meanwhile, Meggie learns that she has inherited her father's gift when she accidentally summons Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Basta comes and takes Meggie and Fenoglio back to Capricorn's village. Capricorn intends to use Meggie to read the Shadow, Inkheart's supernatural and most deadly villain, out of the book and into the real world, using a copy of the book he had secretly kept to himself. After a brief reunion with her mother, Meggie is coerced into cooperating or risk Capricorn killing Resa. Elinor in the meantime discovers Fenoglio's ransacked apartment and rents a motorbike to save her family. As Mo, Farid and Dustfinger work on a plan of burning down Capricorn's castle, Dustfinger is captured. After escaping his cell, he attempts to free Meggie and Fenoglio who is working on a way to rewrite the ending of the Shadow for her to read. He is unable to free them, and flees, only to return at his conscience (or perhaps Meggie's) beckoning.
Meggie is escorted out to read the Shadow out of the book, and Fenoglio and Resa are caged to be his first meal. Fenoglio manages to use Toto to give her a page that he had written, and she manages to call off the Shadow. In the scuffle, she loses the rewrite and Shadow attempts again to kill Resa, Fenoglio, and Mo, who had intervened in the fight. Mo gives Meggie a pen to write her own ending, and using her arm, Meggie manages to send all the book characters back to their own stories, and at Fenoglio's request, sends him into the Inkheart world as well. Dustfinger misses his chance to return, and departs when Elinor, Resa, Mo and Meggie embrace, where Meggie discovers that Inkheart had been taken.
Farid catches up with Dustfinger, insisting on traveling with him to find another reader to send Dustfinger back into the copy of Inkheart that Farid had stolen before the castle collapsed. After a moment's hesitation, Dustfinger agrees, and the two start off together, only to have Mo come up to fulfill his promise to return Dustfinger to his book. Dustfinger is transported safely back into Inkheart, where he reunites with his wife Roxane. Farid reveals to the family that Dustfinger's fate has been changed, as he pulls Gwin out of a travel pack he is carrying, and without the marten to sacrifice himself for, Dustfinger is again in control of his destiny. Meggie and Resa invite Farid to live with them, and Meggie agrees to teach him how to read and Farid agrees to teach her how to use the dragon fire.

99. Sky High

Title: Sky High
Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Family
Year: 2005

Summary: The story describes the beginning of the freshman year for Will Stronghold at Sky High School, a school for young superheroes that floats in the sky. Will's parents pose as suburban real-estate agents Steve and Josie Stronghold, but they are really The Commander and Jetstream , the two most famous and powerful superheroes. The Commander has superhuman strength, and Jetstream is able to fly. Will's best friend is Layla, a pretty supergirl who can manipulate plant life.
The students at Sky High include Speed, a bully who can run faster than the human eye can see; Lash , a bully who can stretch his body; Penny, a cheerleader who can make copies of herself; and Warren Peace, the brooding, fire-throwing son of a supervillain and a superhero, who are currently at war. Warren's father was sent to prison by the Commander, and will be released after his third life. As the school year begins, Will is the only student who has not yet developed any superpowers. Students with great powers are taught to be heroes, while less capable youngsters are designated as "hero support" and derisively referred to as "sidekicks". The abilities of the sidekicks include melting, glowing, and turning into a guinea pig. Will is put into the sidekick program due to his lack of powers, and Layla is made a sidekick after she protests the two tiered schooling by refusing to demonstrate her powers.
At the end of Will's first day at Sky High, the Commander shows him the Stronghold family's underground control center, the Secret Sanctum, which holds souvenirs from past battles. One souvenir is a weapon called a "Pacifier", which the Commander took from his arch-enemy, a supervillain named Royal Pain, fifteen years ago. Another is the eyeball of a robot the Commander recently defeated. As the Commander and Will chat, Royal Pain remotely spies on them through a camera hidden in the eyeball.
Will initially makes friends with the sidekicks, but he is transferred to the Hero program after his latent super-strength emerges during a fight with Warren. He also attracts the attention of Gwen Grayson, a beautiful "technopath" who controls machines with her mind. Will makes a date with Layla to prove he still likes her, but he forgets about it and has dinner with Gwen and his parents, so Layla tries to make him jealous by getting Warren to go with her to the Sky High homecoming dance.
On the day before the dance, Gwen tricks Will into throwing a party at his house, and Speed steals the Pacifier when she seduces Will into showing her the Secret Sanctum. She also convinces Layla that Will no longer likes her, but Will rejects Gwen's snobbishness and refuses to go to the dance with her, even though his parents have promised to attend as honorary guests. After his parents leave for the dance, Will reads the Commander's school yearbook, which contains a photograph of a girl who looks just like Gwen. When he sees a picture of the girl holding a pacifier, he guesses that the girl is Royal Pain and Gwen is her daughter, sees that the Pacifier is missing, and concludes that Gwen must be avenging herself on the Commander for defeating her mother. Will contacts the Sky High bus driver, who rushes him to the dance.
Meanwhile, Gwen reveals to the dance participants that she is Royal Pain herself, who was formally a brilliant schoolgirl who invented the pacifier, but despite that and her powers, she was underestimated by the school and therefore made a sidekick. Outraged, she hatched a plan to destroy Sky High and replace it with her own school for supervillains, with the intention of turning everyone into babies with the Pacifier and raising them into villains. Only Warren and the sidekicks escape.
When Will arrives at school, he apologizes to Layla and teams up with Warren and the sidekicks to defeat Gwen, Speed, Lash, and Penny. He discovers he has also inherited his mother's flying ability when Gwen throws him off Sky High's floating platform, and he helps to hold the school in the air as the sidekicks reactivate its sabotaged antigravity device. The babies are returned to their original state, Will and Layla kiss, and the dance resumes while Royal Pain and her gang are held in the detention room. Afterward, the villains are sent to prison, Warren becomes Will's best friend, Layla becomes Will's girlfriend, and the bus driver becomes a superhero after falling into a vat of toxic waste.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

98. Zoom

Title: Zoom
Genre: Action, Adventure, Family
Year: 2006

Summary: Decades prior to the start of the film, the American military sponsored a superhero group called "Team Zenith." Its leaders were Jack Shepard, aka Captain Zoom, who possessed super-speed, and his brother, Connor, aka Concussion, who could project sonic blasts. The military tried to increase the team's powers by exposing them to an experimental form of radiation called "Gamma-13". This caused Concussion to become more powerful, but it also turned him evil. Concussion killed his teammates Marksman, Ace, and Daravia. Concussion was believed to be killed by Zoom in an explosion, but he had been sent into another dimension instead. Zoom lost his powers, and his brother.
Thirty years later, Dr. Grant, the scientist behind the original Zenith Project, discovers that Concussion is making his way back into their dimension. General Larraby, the military officer in charge of the Project, decides to form a new Zenith Team to fight him.
Jack finds himself dragged back into the Project, this time as an instructor. He is told that a new team is needed to battle a great menace but is not told what it is. He is also told that if natural training does not prepare the new team in time, they will be exposed to Gamma-13. In their secret base, Area 52 (a reference to Area 51), he meets Marsha, who is a beautiful but clumsy psychologist, a big fan of Zoom's, and knows of him only through the comic book propaganda adaptations of the team's adventures.
The project holds an audition of would-be members, most of whom possess useless or disgusting powers. In the end, four young people are selected:
  • Dylan West, a 17-year-old boy who can turn invisible and has clairvoyance.
  • Summer Jones, a 16-year-old girl with telekinetic powers and empathic senses.
  • Tucker William, a 12-year-old boy with the power to enlarge any part of his body.
  • Cindy Collins, a 6-year-old girl with super strength.
All of them are shown as having problems adapting to normal life because of their powers. At first things do not go well. Jack is bitter about the past, and his sarcastic attitude disappoints Marsha. Dylan keeps trying to escape, Tucker has self-esteem problems and trouble controlling his powers, and the kids are annoyed by Jack's attitude. The team eventually forces Jack to face the fact that he's not really putting his heart into their training. Slowly things begin to come together. As the new team's abilities improve, they adopt superhero identities.
Eventually, just as Concussion is about to arrive on Earth, it is discovered that Dylan also possesses a kind of clairsentience that allows him to discover not only Concussion's location, but also the project's true purpose: the team is meant merely as a distraction from the military's plans to capture Concussion in a special net to send him back into another dimension. Marsha also reveals that she secretly possesses a superpower of her own: "super breath", which appears as clouds of rainbow-colored wind. She uses this power to aid the team in their escape. Using a malfunctioning flying saucer stored in the base, Jack escapes with the team, including Marsha. He is dropped off at a point in a desert where Concussion will arrive, planning to try to talk to him. Jack tells the team to stay away, but they refuse.
When Concussion arrives, he refuses to listen to reason and starts firing sonic blasts at his brother. The rest of the team takes him on. Larraby orders the net to be fired, but Concussion blasts it away, and it almost lands on Cindy. This causes Jack to react and recover his speed, and he saves her. He then runs back to the base (tripping over in the process), puts on a new costume, and returns to battle his brother. Working together, the team (plus Marsha) knock Concussion into a high-speed vortex that Zoom creates by running around in a circle at super-speed; Dr. Grant yells to Zoom that if he closes the vortex, they can save Concussion; the vortex ultimately sucks the energy out of his body and restores him to normal. The two brothers are happily reunited.
At the end you see that Dylan is dating Summer, Summer is on the cheerleading team, using her telekinetic power to help build the pyramid, Tucker is the goalie on the soccer team, and Cindy is in a play, Rapunzel, and uses her power to pull the "prince" up the tower. In addition they still work together with Zoom as the new Zenith Team.

97. Superhero Movie


Title: Superhero Movie
Genre: Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Year: 2008

Summary: Rick Riker is an unpopular student at Empire High School. He lives with his Uncle Albert and Aunt Lucille. He has one friend and confidant, Trey. His crush, Jill Johnson, who hardly notices him, is dating Lance Landers, a bully who torments Rick. During a school field trip at an animal research lab, Rick meets Lou Landers who coughs up blood because he is terminally ill. Dr. Strom, the head researcher at the lab, presents his mutated dragonflies, one of which has escaped and bites Rick, and causes his neck to swell.
By the time Rick returns home he is violently ill. Uncle Albert and Aunt Lucille believe Rick is acting strange, so Albert proceeds to talk to Rick about puberty, but Rick passes out from the bite. He wakes up five days later, tries to look up "dragonfly bite" online but is contacted by a stranger instead who wants to speak to him in person, later adding Rick as a friend on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Lou Landers is involved in an accident during an experiment at the lab, transforming him into Hourglass, a villainous being who can siphon the life energy from others, killing them.
During a science fair at school in which a comically rude and mean-spirited Stephen Hawking is present, Rick begins to experience strange physical traits, such as becoming stuck to objects, which creates a number of mishaps during the fair. Fleeing school, he discovers has developed superhuman abilities, such as the ability to walk on walls and superhuman strength, though he repeatedly laments throughout the film that he cannot fly. After testing his abilities, he pushes an elderly woman and her dog out of the way of an out-of-control truck, colliding with the truck himself. He is congratulated by passers-by, though he notices that the elderly woman he shoved out of the way landed into a woodchipper and crushed, with her dog still on its leash.
Rick reveals his secret to his uncle and Trey and the latter offers to become his sidekick, but Rick refuses. He and Uncle Albert have an argument, which spurs a flashback sequence in which a younger Rick and his parents are mugged in an alley, and die in a spoof of Batman Begins. With his dying words, his father urges him to sell all his shares in Google, but invest heavily in Enron.
Later, after seeing Jill and Lance leave in Lance's Porsche Cayman, Rick, who desires a car of his own, goes to a bank, where he is denied a loan. A bank robber then holds up the bank and after Rick fails to stop him, Uncle Albert is shot and hospitalized. Jill visits Rick at the hospital, and they kiss for the first time. Meanwhile Landers accidentally takes his secretary's life energy, killing her.
Rick is met by Xavier at his school for mutants ala X-Men where he meets Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, the Invisible Woman and Mrs. Xavier. Rick is told to make a costume by Mrs. Xavier, and adopts the identity of the Dragonfly. He meets the Human Torch but fails to fly. Dragonfly quickly becomes a media sensation, fights and gets badly injured by Hourglass who manages to escape stealing a canister of Cerillium.
Jill is attacked by muggers, but Dragonfly saves her. Just after Dragonfly defeats the last of the thugs, Jill is shown with an admiring look on her face, and it starts to rain heavily, setting the scene for a hot, romantic moment, but Dragonfly disappears up a building. Jill looks for him and when she can't find him, she calls out "Where are you?", and Dragonfly responds "Behind you." A startled Jill turns around and finds Dragonfly hanging upside down hoping Jill will thank him with a kiss. Jill tells Dragonfly he saved her life, and shyly asks Dragonfly if she can thank him with a kiss. This is the moment Dragonfly has been waiting for his whole life, so he agrees, and Jill moves in. Just before she can kiss him, Dragonfly slides down so he has a perfect view down Jill's shirt. Jill lifts him back up, but he goes over the building, leaving Jill alone. Jill thinks her chance to kiss Dragonfly is over,and she desperately searches for him. Dragonfly sneaks up behind Jill and taps her shoulder. Jill turns and sees her savior. The two of them are unsure what to do for a few seconds, but Jill moves toward Dragonfly, and the two of them share an extended kiss, which Dragonfly has been dreaming of his whole life. Dragonfly tries to kiss Jill again, but decides to fight more crime to impress her. Landers plans to construct a machine that will kill 42 thousand people and give him enough life energy to make him immortal. During a Thanksgiving dinner at the Rikers', Landers visits the family, where he nearly catches Rick dressed as the Dragonfly. Though Rick escapes detection, Landers later manages to learn his secret identity. Just as Rick and Jill are about to kiss, the Hourglass appears and murders Aunt Lucille. Uncle Albert recovers, and after a comical funeral, Rick decides to end his superhero career, though Trey and Uncle Albert convince him to find Hourglass, who plans to kill countless innocent people. At an awards ceremony to honor achievements in feminine hygiene, Landers is presented with a Douchebag Of The Year Award. Although Rick goes to the ceremony too, Landers tricks him into thinking that the Dalai Lama is Hourglass, which leads to a brawl in the ceremony hall involving all the attendees, including Buddhist monks, the Pope and Stephen Hawking. During this, Jill discovers that Landers is Hourglass. In a nearby hall there is a superhero convention where a flying machine awaits Hourglass. Landers gets in the convention hall and changes into Hourglass as Rick gets into his Dragonfly costume and fights him. When Hourglass tries to finish off Dragonfly, Jill attempts to intervene and is critically injured. Hourglass flies off with the machine to the rooftop where he activates the machine to steal the lifeforce from all the attendees of the ceremony and the convention.
After Stephen Hawking implores Rick not to give up, using a rationale that Rick points out are the lyrics to Celine Dion's "Taking Chances", he dons the Dragonfly suit, and battles the Hourglass on the rooftop. Dragonfly siphons off some of Hourglass's stolen lifeforce to heal Jill, but the Hourglass throws a bomb at Dragonfly, with the bomb sticking to Dragonfly's crotch. He backflips several times, finally managing to stick the bomb to Hourglass. Stuck to his invention, he shouts "Oh, f**k!" , with the bomb detonating and killing him.
Jill falls off the roof, but Dragonfly jumps off after her. After he grabs her and reveals that he is Rick, Jill tells him that she loves him,and they passionately kiss, and Rick finally grows wings. He flies them away, landing on the rooftop where uncle Albert and Stephen Hawking await them. While they walk away, Hawking's wheelchair gets stuck and hits the ledge sending Hawking to a freefall. Rick and Jill fly once more but they are hit by a helicopter.
As an epilogue, before the end credits roll, several "cut scenes" are shown with even more extreme parody.

Alternate Ending: Instead of the rooftop battle, the Hourglass and Rick battle inside the comic book convention. At one point, several convention attendees tell the Hourglass how to kill people. When the Hourglass is defeated, Landers' nephew realizes that Rick has killed his uncle. Enraged, he lunges for Rick, but is knocked out by Trey with the Douchebag of the Year Award. Instead of Hawking falling off the building, he is blown up by an Hourglass Bomb, and crushed by his falling wheelchair. The helicopter scene is omitted from this version, as Rick and Jill silently share two passionate kisses, which are significant because Rick initiates the kiss with Jill for the first time as the end credits roll.