They Call Me Jeeg (2016)

There is a certain grim integrity to They Call Me Jeeg, a 2015 Italian production that drops a radioactive superhero into the concrete sprawl of Tor Bella Monaca and lets him behave exactly as a small-time thief would. Enzo Ceccotti acquires his strength from a ruptured barrel in the Tiber and immediately uses it to steal an ATM. This is not a film that believes power arrives with a conscience attached. Gabriele Mainetti shoots the slum with a documentary plainness, and the result plays closer to a Camorra crime picture than to anything from the Marvel assembly line. The radioactive waste is a plot mechanism and nothing more. No environmental thesis attaches to it. The barrel leaks, a man gains strength, and the river moves on.

The human furniture around Enzo is where the film's cultural attitudes become legible, though they amount to very little. Alessia, a psychologically damaged young woman who filters reality through the Steel Jeeg anime, exists to be rescued, to disclose a history of sexual abuse, and to die so that Enzo can find his moral purpose. Her suffering is a device. Nunzia, the female gangster, is presented as a terrorist and disposed of with a flamethrower and a bullet. A Brazilian transsexual loanshark appears in the margins as underworld texture, mentioned and then forgotten. None of this is put forward as argument. The film simply arranges its wounded and its wicked and lets the plot proceed.

What remains is a redemption arc of the most conventional sort. Enzo jumps into the Tiber with a bomb and a villain, dies a hero, and returns to watch over Rome wearing a knitted mask. The film never stops to lecture us about how to live. It has no thesis to press, no systemic grievance to air, no sermon to deliver. For a superhero picture in this decade, that restraint registers as almost antique.