EWhat if superheroes hadn’t said their last word? Drained by overabundant production from the studios, the genre seems to be brain dead, undermined by absent originality. A reality that Netflix refuses to come to grips with. With SupraCell, the firm is offering from June 27 to drag the vigilantes and their skills onto a new playing field. Risky bet.
In this six-episode mini-series, director (and ex-rapper) Rapman – whose film Blue Story had already won a Bafta in 2020 – narrates the excesses of London’s youth through the unique lens of superpowers. But above all through their owners. Here, Michael (Tosin Cole, seen in Bob Marley: One Love), a young delivery driver with the gift of teleportation, must bring together five other people with extraordinary abilities to hope to save the woman he loves from a terrible threat…
A quest at a crossroads, between the diametrically opposed paths of our protagonists – from the novice nurse to the teenager from difficult neighborhoods, including a father struggling to make ends meet – which is not lacking to refer to the everyday tragedies experienced by the British.
The portrait thus painted of the current climate among our neighbors in Albion is far from optimistic, evoking both job instability and the increase in knife attacks, against a backdrop of gang warfare.
“SupraCell”, a metaphor for racism
This story is also reminiscent of the fabulous Chronicle by Josh Trank. We think of this cult film in the process, still rare on screen, consisting of bombarding a few people with extraordinary faculties, precisely in order to better bring out their humanity. Chronicle also hovers over SupraCell in his way of exploiting/diverting the codes of superheroism to speak about society.
Because if in Chronicleit is indeed school harassment that was in question, SupraCell uses the need for power to talk about racism. The protagonists of the series are all black and all in a delicate condition, illustrating, through superhumanity, the need to redouble efforts to get out of the turmoil. A figure of speech rather well negotiated by Netflix, which had accustomed us to eminently less successful attempts at politics in its content.
More SupraCell is not a hit on all fronts. Already on the pace, which only picks up from the second episode – too bad, for those who stop before. The show only really seems to begin when our characters discover their superpowers. Suffice to say that the pilot is almost useless. The uneven production doesn’t help matters: with the rigor of a correctly composed shot, a scene can appear that looks like it was shot on an iPhone. Hard. Third pitfall: interpretation, too often on the side of overplaying. Damage.
Despite everything, we do not shy away from our pleasure in this story which takes risks, at the risk of taking blows. The tour de force of the series is to succeed in engaging the audience, by offering a fable that is oh so current, also borrowing heavily from Top Boy (2011-2023). Already partially produced by Netflix, this fiction depicted in a very crude manner the reality of drug trafficking and its consequences in east London.
Certainly, SupraCell will not revolutionize the genre, as she perhaps expected. The series, however, marks a nice progression compared to the rest of Netflix’s rather disappointing recent forays into the field, such as Project Power (with Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in 2020) or, in France, How I became a superhero (with Pio Marmaï and Leïla Bekhti, 2020). And slips a zest of renewal and a hint of irreverence into a formula which, for too many years already, seems to have lost most of its flavor. It can be watched without pretension or expectations… And it’s June 27, on Netflix.
