MOVIE REVIEW : Joe Pesci Is Super in ‘The Super’

Joe Pesci has the title role in the good-natured yet pertinent comedy “The Super” (citywide), and the fit is so perfect it must have been tailored especially for him. He’s Louie Kritski, the dutiful son of a New York slumlord (Vincent Gardenia), who has given him his very own building, a once-handsome Beaux Arts structure in the East Village. Gardenia’s Big Louie, who owns 27 such tenements, has a very simple business philosophy: “When a Kritski gets a building, what does he do with it? Nothing!”

Neither Big Louie nor his son is prepared for the implacability of Madolyn Smith Osborne’s Naomi Bensinger, a housing authority attorney who actually succeeds in prosecuting Louie, who is sentenced to living 120 days in his own building, during which time he is expected to bring it up to code.

Now we know very well that the hardhearted Louie, who advises one of his tenants to burn one of his kids if he wants to keep warm, is going to undergo a change of heart, and director Rod Daniel and debuting screenwriter Sam Simon know that we know. Therefore, they wisely concentrate on how to make Louie’s transformation as plausible as possible beneath a nonstop flow of knockabout comedy and in-your-face banter, involving him gradually with his neighbors.

With its broad slapstick humor, “The Super” calls attention to the very real evil of slumlords, but the way in which it does so is admirably shrewd. For at its core, the film is the story of a middle-aged man who, inadvertently escaping his father’s unquestioned authority for the first time in his life, has a real opportunity to think for himself.

The film’s linchpin scene reveals care and judgment on the part of the filmmakers. Up on the apartment roof, Louie, who has unconsciously started to change, is trying to help a bright young boy, Tito (Kenny Blank), understand why his grandmother won’t let him keep the bicycle his father has purchased from money made in drug peddling. Louie explains that the father is dealing in misery--only to have Tito point out that in that case their fathers are the same. For an essentially broad and sentimental comedy aiming at the widest crossover audience possible, “The Super” has been thoroughly thought out.

Even at his most obnoxious and unfeeling, Pesci’s Louie, comical as he most often is, commands a certain respect. If Big Louie has passed on to him his gift for street invective and an initially reflexive indifference to others he has also made him fearless. Pint-size Louie plows into a neighborhood basketball game with the confidence of a Wilt Chamberlain and pursues the impervious Bensinger with equal verve. Pesci is a genuine pleasure throughout, as is the rest of the cast, which includes Ruben Blades as one of Louie’s canniest tenants. “The Super” (rated R for language) may be relentlessly, unabashedly commercial entertainment, but it accomplishes quite effectively what it sets out to do.

‘The Super’

Joe Pesci: Louie Kritski

Vincent Gardenia: Big Louie Kritski

Madolyn Smith Osborne: Naomi Bensinger

Ruben Blades; Marlon

Kenny Blank: Tito

A 20th Century Fox release of a Largo Entertainment presentation in association with JVC Entertainment Inc. Director Rod Daniel. Producer Charles Gordon. Executive producer Ron Frazier. Screenplay by Sam Simon. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees. Editor Jack Hofstra. Costumes Aude Bronson-Howard. Music Miles Goodman. Production design Kristi Zea. Art director Jeremy Conway. Set decorator Leslie Pope. Sound Tom Brandau. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (for language).