siderite Released in the same year as Kick Ass, Griff the Invisible is also about a wannabe superhero. Working in an office at day, bullied and seen as weird by his coworkers, Ryan Kwanten's character assumes the identity of Griff the Protector at night. Doomed to be forever weird, his salvation comes in the form of another weird person, played by the ridiculously beautiful Maeve Dermody, who falls for him as the only person who is like her that she has met.Now, I can't really say if I liked the movie or not. I loved the idea of the invisibility cloak made by soaking a suit in invisible ink and other quirky ideas like that, but in the end we are talking about weird romance and not superheroes, a switch that comes into play around the middle of the film. If you feel out of place in the "real world" you might feel the vibe that connects you to the characters, but the underlying drama of it all made me feel more uncomfortable than I would have wanted. Is Griff insane or not? And if yes, is that OK if he found the girl willing to love and enable him in his insanity? Watch the film and answer for yourself.

evanston_dad For every Batman out there, who's got gobs of money and gadgets galore to do his crime fighting for him, how many other self-anointed superheroes make do with homemade costumes and gadgets that can be pieced together with plunder from the local hardware store? That's the question "Griff the Invisible" poses at its start, introducing us to a quiet, painfully shy office worker who takes the law into his own hands when the sun goes down. But what at first seems like it's going to be a quirky riff on the superhero formula goes in surprising, and surprisingly serious, directions, and gives us instead a movie about what it means to be normal in a world that can be anything but.Ryan Kwanten buries his natural good looks under a socially awkward persona and gives a sweet, painful performance as Griff. He plays Griff rather like a benign version of Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro's uber-scary character in "Taxi Driver," an unassuming guy who's completely out of touch with the world around him and goes home at night to entertain fantasies about being the hero in the drama of his own making.Of course "Taxi Driver" goes into far darker places than "Griff the Invisible," and that's actually one of the things I didn't like about the latter movie. Griff's adherence to a fantasy world isn't healthy and shouldn't really be humored as his girlfriend suggests it should. How long before illusion and reality blur in the head of someone like that, with who knows what kinds of consequences? But the movie isn't interested in discussing that particular question at any length, which makes for a happier, sweeter ending, if a somewhat dishonest one.Grade: A-

Social Buzz Griff The Invisible is a lovely story about Griff (Ryan Kwanten – True Blood) and Melody (Maeve Dermody – Beautiful Kate) who live in their own solitary worlds. They come together when they discover they are a like with their passion for the impossible.Griff is a quiet character who gets teased at his office day job. When the sun goes down, he becomes a hero by saving people from random attacks in the night. He goes on a mission to create an invisibility cloak and succeeds. Who would have thought you could make this possible with two simple ingredients. But I'm not going to tell you, you'll have to wait until you see the movie.Melody is a loner and an experimental scientist. She's into physics and tries her hardest to walk through walls as she figures out that there is all this space between matter, so it must be possible. I actually got goose bumps when her hand imprinted in the wall when she first succeeds, hair raising stuff.This is a true Australian style film with lots of humour and great Aussie actors; Patrick Brammall, Toby Schmitz, Marshall Napier and Heather Mitchell.I felt so many different emotions, some I'm not familiar with. I think because they touched a nerve with me i.e. physics and different dimensions, it got me thinking, as I often wonder about this stuff. It was a truly beautiful moment when they realised their uniqueness made them the same. They could relate to each other and communicate on the same level. It is just like in reality, when you meet someone amazing when you least expect it and you both get each other, it's magical.

Alex Di Sigh... Here we go again.I only recently reviewed "Super", exposing it for what it was: a cheap exploitation. "Griff the Invisible" is just as much so as "Super". Read my review on "Super", all the points I made against it are valid in this case as well. These movies do not have to be about "the darker side" of being a superhero. In case of Griff, he's not even a hero, he's an antihero in the correct sense of a word. Dictionary definition states the following: antihero is a central character of a work of fiction who lacks the traditional heroic virtues.All the usual shenanigans are there in the case of Griff: a very unsympathetic protagonist, a lack of motivation, a lack of a defined antagonist (bad for a superhero movie, "Super" had a good one though) and a very strong female lead.The movie is essentially about an adult that's unable to grow up, living in a fantasy world and a girl that comes to his aid. Very similar to "Defendor", except that particular movie wasn't bad at all (also the protagonist had a mental developmental disability).The movie is also full of pseudo-scientific nonsense to make it seem more intellectual, where's it comes out as silly to anyone with even an elementary knowledge of the discussed (pseudo-)scientific topics. I shall give one example of this. One of the main characters pounders a "theoretical" possibility of one physical object being able to move straight through another, due to the fact that most space between the molecules and atoms that an object is comprised of is empty. That fact is true: we are mostly empty space if we're talking about matter only. But those atoms and molecules also have bonds between them to form an object, unless it is a gas where those bonds are very weak. These bonds keep us together, were they to break we would fall apart. These bonds are energetic in nature, they would be disrupted if another bond were to be introduced in the same space. To penetrate solid matter an object has to reach a superfluid state, a highly homogeneous state of matter, but even then it is not really penetrating anything, but rather seeping through tiny empty cracks, benefiting from a complete lack of friction. It goes without saying that one would never survive such a transformation.Oh, yes, there's also a lot of metaphysical garbage as well and as some of us may know: metaphysics is useless because it can be used to explain everything, since it itself is built out of the unknowable.The only two good things I have to say about Griff are as follows. Maeve Dermody who plays Melody does so very neatly. She brings a lot of life into this barren wasteland of a film. She's also a great actress, I hope to see her in a movie that is actually good. Also the soundtrack is very nice indeed.The ending is interesting, but I had seen it done before, so nothing special there.Nothing else to say about it really. As a struggling superhero sub-genre goes this one is nothing to write home about. I suggest you skip it. Two points to Maeve and a half to the soundtrack, rounding it down, just because I feel like it.