If, as the song instructs, you don't tug on Superman's cape, how exactly would you approach Woody Harrelson's would-be superhero in "Defendor"? 
 
 For starters, don't point out to this man-child dressed in black tights with a shoe-polish eye mask and the letter "D" duct-taped on his chest that his name should be Defender not Defendor. He might flip out and throw a bunch of marbles at you. And don't question the validity of his mission -- defeating the evil drug lord Captain Industry -- or he might really get angry and crack open a jar containing angry wasps. 
 
 "Defendor" writer-director Peter Stebbings hopes you chuckle at his crime-fighter's idiosyncrasies but he's after more than laughs with this shaggy-dog character study. Tackling the idea of heroism itself, Stebbings wants us to look at his underdog daredevil and see that it's possible to affect change in the face of great odds, even if you aren't armed with a trench club. 
 
 That's a tall order for a wisp of a movie containing many different -- and, often, conflicting -- ambitions. Through flashback interviews with a court-appointed forensic psychiatrist (Sandra Oh), we learn that Arthur Poppington, a.k.a. Defendor (Harrelson, completely winning in his clench-jawed purposefulness), dons his costume both to escape and avenge the pain that came when his mother abandoned him as a child. ||||| Defendor (out of four) Starring Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas and Sandra Oh. Written and directed by Peter Stebbings. 95 minutes. At AMC Yonge-Dundas. 14A 
 
 The antidote for all those brooding comic-book superheroes wrestling with inner torment and battling computer-generated baddies can be found in a seriously dedicated dude with a duct-tape D on his sweater and a jar of marbles as his secret weapon. 
 
 First-time Canadian director Peter Stebbings presents a sweetly engaging and very watchable take on an unlikely hero tale with Defendor, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last year. 
 
 Woody Harrelson is superb as Arthur Poppington, a 40-something man-child who truly believes he is Defendor, self-appointed protector of the citizens of Hamilton from "punks." (There's no attempt to hide Steeltown's gritty, wintry identity; the radio call-in show signs in from "the Hammer" and locals thumb tabloid-size copies of The Spectator.) 
 
 We first meet Arthur as he undergoes a psychiatric assessment with a sympathetic court-appointed shrink (Sandra Oh) after his arrest for dumping a local drycleaner head-first into a garbage can. Arthur has his reasons for doing it, but he's not telling. "It's classified," he says evenly. 
 
 A flagman for the city, he's been squatting in the municipal works yard, perfecting his arsenal of homemade punk-busting weaponry. At night, Arthur dons his "uniform" of bike helmet, utility belt and face-paint mask to take to the streets as Defendor. In between stopping crime, he's on the lookout for Capt. Industry, the mythic "evil mastermind" he is sure is behind the town's ills. 
 
 Stuck in the mindset of a comic-book-loving kid, steely-eyed Arthur is fond of using hero-speak: "Trouble has a way of following me." So when he "rescues" lippy Katarina (Kat Dennings), a crack-smoking teen hooker, Arthur sees it as a civic duty and a chance to set her on the straight and narrow. She sees it as a free place to crash and a gullible guy to rip off. 
 
 Dennings makes Katarina both tough and reluctantly tender, a trope that could be an annoying stereotype in less-skilled hands. But Stebbings has given her a lot to work with, and there's plenty of onscreen chemistry with Harrelson's Arthur that makes us genuinely care about these characters. 
 
 Rhetorical questions have no place in Arthur's world. "Who writes your dialogue, Spider-Man?" sneers Kat. "I write it myself," he replies, slightly hurt. 
 
 Montreal actor Elias Koteas plays crooked cop Dooney with malevolent glee. He's especially good when going toe-to-toe with Defendor/Arthur, who tries to elicit information by squirting lime juice in his eyes. Take that! 
 
 Stebbings fills Defendor was humorous bits, comic treats dropped in quickly and without fanfare. It gives the movie a proper pace, well punctuated with laughs at the right time, and outrage and sympathy at others. What makes the film work so well is Arthur's unrelenting seriousness and dedication to the literal truth. He is a superhero; bullets cannot harm him. If it happened on The Rockford Files, it must be true. This isn't a game to Arthur and while others may find his mission hilarious, he will not waver. 
 
 "I can't relax," he protests. "Not while there are people out there who need me." 
 
 John Rowley's score marches along nicely in the early scenes, sounding like a vintage episode of TV's Superman as Defendor heads out to make the gritty streets safe again in a utility bucket truck, the Mack bulldog hood ornament similarly masked and labelled "Defendog." 
 
 There's another dimension of the superhero at work in Defendor and a suggestion that this kind of work can be the business of mere mortals, too. Taking on the mantel of protector is perhaps the most heroic deed of all. 
 
 Related article: Director got Defendor costume at Value Village 
 
 ||||| Imagine Woody Harrelson's slaphappy simpleton Woody Boyd from "Cheers" if he were mad as hell and not planning to take it anymore. Then give him a nasty, vintage World War I trench club and turn him loose on the mean streets. 
 
 That roughly is the scenario in writer-director Peter Stebbings' "Defendor," with Harrelson as a wannabe superhero with no superpowers and no abundance of brain power, either. 
 
 The low-budget movie continually shifts from comic-book spoof to gritty crime story to mental-health drama, the inconsistent tone preventing it from ever fully working as one or another. 
 
 Harrelson's Arthur Poppington has much of the aw-shucks innocence of Harrelson's Iowa farm boy Woody on "Cheers," with little of the charm. And what appeal Arthur does have winds up seriously undermined when he starts using a nutcracker to break knuckles or bashing people in the head with his truncheon. 
 
 Stebbings sees Arthur as a vigilante with a heart of gold going after sadistic drug and prostitute traffickers. Trouble is, Arthur seems as much a sadist as the bad guys. 
 
 In Arthur's deluded world, he is a black-clad fighter for justice named Defendor, wearing a capital D in duct tape across his chest, his arsenal including jars of wasps he lobs like grenades and fistfuls of marbles he lets fly like shrapnel. 
 
 Though he'll take on whatever thugs the night coughs up, Arthur always is hunting for his nemesis, a criminal mastermind he calls Captain Industry, whom he blames for his mother's death. 
 
 Arthur continually crosses paths with corrupt cop Dooney (Elias Koteas), who is working with a gang smuggling drugs and women. Both men take repeated shellackings that would leave them in intensive care, yet the next time we see them, they are ready for more. Apparently, it is not just big Hollywood action films that seriously overestimate the resilience of the human body. 
 
 Allies and witnesses to Arthur's quest line up throughout, led by spirited hooker Katerina (Kat Dennings), who becomes both sidekick and damsel for our hero. 
 
 The action is told in flashback mode through interview segments with Sandra Oh as a court-appointed psychiatrist, evaluating Arthur's mental state after he attacks a store owner and dumps him in a garbage can. 
 
 We also get some deeper flashbacks to Arthur's childhood, meant to explain his nuttiness, though the sequences really do not clarify what pushed him this far off the deep end. 
 
 Empathy comes and goes with Arthur, Harrelson at times coming across as a hurt man-child, other times simply exploding in ugly fury. 
 
 With Arthur resembling a raccoon from the black grease paint he slathers about his eyes to become Defendor, you end up not so much rooting for him as for the psychiatric profession, hoping it lives up to its destiny and gets this nut case off the streets and into a facility that can do him some good. 
 
 "Defendor," a Darius Films release, is rated R for drug use and language throughout, violence and sexual content. Running time: 102 minutes. Two stars out of four. ||||| Defendor 
 
 Directed and written by Peter Stebbings 
 
 Starring Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas 
 
 Classification: 14A 
 
 The old notion that to surrender to the charms of a movie, you need to suspend disbelief in the artifices that make up the movie really gets put to the test in Defendor. 
 
 The debut feature of Vancouver-born director/writer Peter Stebbings, Defendor is a comic book of a film that dares to be taken seriously and dares you to be moved in turn. Amazingly, it succeeds. Not entirely, mind you, but enough to prove that the buzz the film enjoyed as a world premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival was not undeserved. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Defendor certainly embraces pretty much all the conceits of the superhero comic book, but in a decidedly down-market way. Made for $3.5-million, it looks, if anything, cheaper. Its tropes include the obligatory costumed hero (with the equally obligatory tragic origin story), the attractive damsel in distress, cruel villains, under-resourced cops and an urban milieu riven with corruption and crime. 
 
 Only here the milieu isn’t New York, Metropolis or some other fantastical fantasyland, it’s Hamilton, pop. 500,000 – and the Hammer in winter no less! The damsel, moreover, is a teen hooker with a crack habit, her dark knight a dimwitted man-child who, for all his purity of heart and nobility of intentions, is of greater danger to himself than the denizens of the Steeltown underworld. 
 
 By day, Woody Harrelson is Arthur Poppington, bored traffic controller at a construction site. At night he becomes Defendor, black-clad battler of crime and/or evil with an arsenal of gadgets that includes jars filled with enraged hornets, a trench club from the First World War, marbles and a surveillance camera that records to VHS tapes. Of course, he has a Batmobile – but here it’s a lumbering City of Hamilton construction-crane truck housed in the Public Works garage where he’s living illegally. His identity-concealing mask is shoe polish smeared around the eyes, the Defendor chest logo a crudely lettered “D” made of pieces of duct tape. 
 
 Woody Harrelson stars in Defendor. 
 
 While all these degradations of comic book iconography are quite clever (and funny), they could have ended up being only that – smarty-pants touches in a progressively more feeble genre exercise. Fortunately, the script has enough twists and tweaks and tonal shifts that the homemade “special” effects aren’t Defendor’s only distinction. Certainly the plot has gaping holes of logic. We’re talking comics, after all. Yet like the best comics (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Batman), Defendor resonates as a journey into the mythic, a meditation on heroism, hubris, resourcefulness and redemption as old as the legends of Arthur and the epics of Homer, and with almost as much gravitas. 
 
 Plus, Stebbings – a fine actor when he’s not behind the camera – has a superb cast to carry his inspired silliness. Sandra Oh, for one, is pitch-perfect as the psychiatrist who must convince a disbelieving judge that Arthur, delusional though he may be, belongs in the world at large and not in an institution. Ditto Elias Koteas as Dooney, the sleazy, utterly corrupt cop/pimp at the beck and call of the reptilian criminal mastermind Vladimir Kristic (A.C. Peterson). Kat Dennings is winning, too, as Katerina, the lush-lipped streetwalker who gradually lets Arthur’s noble soul find both the hurt and the heart of gold beneath the crack-encrusted exterior. 
 
 The biggest kudos, though, must go to Harrelson. Blessed with an expressive rubber face and intense blue eyes, he persuasively conveys Arthur’s determination and urgency, his frustration and impishness, as well as the great wells of childhood pain that birthed his alter-ego and fuel his seemingly suicidal crime-busting quest. Harrelson never breaks character, never throws the audience a knowing wink or smirk. The result is a convincing portrait of a lonely, damaged schlub whose moral code and sense of the heroic gesture continue to be shaped by the pulp wisdom and narrative comfort he found decades earlier at the comic book rack in his grandfather’s general store. 
 
 Defendor is more a refreshment of a genre than a transcendence of it. But thanks to Harrelson, you’ll be a believer.
– Woody Harrelson plays a deluded superhero in Defendor, Canadian writer-director Peter Stebbings' debut. The filmmaker's compatriots get where he's coming from; critics south of the border, not so much: "Made for $3.5-million, it looks, if anything, cheaper," James Adams writes in the Globe and Mail. But Harrelson's "expressive rubber face and intense blue eyes" paint a "convincing portrait of a lonely, damaged schlub whose moral code and sense of the heroic" come exclusively from comic books. The flick has "a proper pace, well punctuated with laughs at the right time, and outrage and sympathy at others," writes Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star. At its core is Harrelson's "unrelenting seriousness and dedication to the literal truth." Harrelson is "winning," but "Stebbings is more interested in deconstructing heroism than creating a concrete world," Glenn Whipp writes in the Los Angeles Times. The result is that "the film never meshes into something cohesive." "Imagine Woody Harrelson's slaphappy simpleton Woody Boyd from Cheers if he were mad as hell and not planning to take it anymore," David Germain writes for the AP, and you've got Defendor. Intriguing, but "you end up not so much rooting for him as for the psychiatric profession, hoping it lives up to its destiny and gets this nut case off the streets."