Sky High (2005)

A lighthearted family-oriented take on super-heroes, this has all the tropes and cliches of super-hero films (and comics) and relies on the audience to understand that. In an early scene, the husband-wife team of premiere super-heroes, Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston), have to tackle a giant robot that just began to stroll into the city, but there's no backstory, no mention of who or what sent this robot. It just is. The title refers to a high school for super-hero offspring, floating in the clouds. It's the first day there for the son (Michael Angarano) of the two aforementioned super-heroes, Stronghold (the family name), and there are high expectations of him. The problem is, the son has managed to hide the fact that his powers have not yet manifested (how he has managed to keep this secret is one of the minor weaknesses of the storytelling - the parents seem to take for granted that he has powers even though he's never shown signs of any).

The son turns out to be a late bloomer - his powers do show up (super-strength, later flight) suddenly during a confrontation at school and the theme of the story soon evolves into the old one about everyone having their value. In the universe of this film, there is a class structure of bigshot super-heroes - those with big superpowers - and their sidekicks, those who have weak or lame superpowers. There are also the rare cases of those who never gained powers, even though their parents were superpowered; the bus driver is one of these. All this set-up is entwined into the standard high school coming-of-age storyline. There's a plot also of a mysterious supervillain who plans to gain revenge on the Strongholds and wreck the school. Lynda Carter, famous as TV's Wonder Woman, plays the school principal. Bruce Campbell is the loud coach who determines how new students are classified. The film has a good amount of humor, poking fun at the super-hero genre and its conventions. BoG's Score: 7 out of 10
Sky Trivia: the bus driver's name is Ron Wilson, a Marvel Comics artist in the seventies; Danielle Panabaker, who plays a friend of the Strongholds who can control plant life, couldn't get away from super-heroes - she is a regular on the new Flash TV series.