ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH-SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008) tries to mix standard high-school tropes (cliques, outsiders, alpha slime, loneliness) with a tongue-in-cheek noir story: a wannabe detective investigates someone tampering with SAT scores and discovers something far more sinister may be going on. The mystery is fairly clever but the film never rose above talking-lamp status for me. Bruce Willis plays the principal and Mischa Barton is the protagonist’s bad-girl girlfriend. “You’d better accept that your girlfriend is a bitch.”
Frustrated with contemporary Earth, Supergirl joins THE LEGION OF SUPERHEROES (2023) only to discover Brainiac’s descendant is already training at the Legion academy — come on, he’s got to be as evil as his ancestor, right? Can Kara and fellow trainees Bouncing Boy, Phantom Girl and Arm-Fall-Off Lad find out for sure? This was a fun one, though I could have done without gratuitously working Batman (voiced by Jensen Ackles) into one 21st century sequence — and any Legion fan could spot the twist of Triplicate Girl’s apparent death (if you don’t know, I won’t spoil it for you). “Nobody voted Brainiac 5 into the academy — he hacked the computer to get himself admitted.”
#SFWApro. Cover by Curt Swan, all rights remain with current holders.
