Defendor

Vancouver-born Peter Stebbings started acting when he was 12, went to New York a decade later and, at the age of 28 began a relatively busy career as a TV and movie actor. In 2005, he thought up a screenplay that featured a mentally challenged comic hero. As no Hollywood was interested, it took Stebbings three years to raise the production funds, helped by Telefilm Canada's contributing a quarter of them (C$1 million). Defendor could finally be made, in Toronto and Hamilton, as Stebbings' debut direction.

Some actors who move into a director's chair seem to have spent their previous on-set lives noting fun camera angles. Danny De Vito created charming cinematographic conceits for The War of the Roses, and Stebbings brings a similar comic artfulness to his spoof of the action-thriller superhero genre.

There's a fun-filled set piece showing the maladroit hero attempting to break into the villain's mansion, as seen through a door with warped glass panels. Less successfully, the camera's vantage point during the hero's examination by a court-appointed psychologist (Ontario-born Korean-Canadian Sandro Oh) seems to be through her arm. Throughout the movie, it's evident that it's a labour of love and long thought about framing and lighting effects by Stebbings. They'd all have been wasted without an effective actor for the title role, and Woody Harrelson filled the bill perfectly.

Flashbacks to his childhood construct a simple-minded and repressed character who can't help being honest. He's desperate to track down and destroy evil "Captain Industry", whose drugs killed his mother. In the process, he must fight for justice and the underdogs, donning a make-up mask and black tights. Many times he runs into a crooked cop (played wryly and dryly well by Greek-Canadian Elias Koteas).

He belongs to the big local villain, a fat Serbian (Slavs being fashionably villainous), and a young prostitute who belonged to them both accidentally becomes Defendor's accomplice (given a street-cred complexity by Kat Dennings). There's an almost too-good-to-be true former boss and friend who watches out for the Defendor's interests, a sympathetic police chief, and there's little time left for other characters because Harrelson's bumbling and insanely courageous hero is dominating the screenplay, very delightfully. The occasional arch word plays his character utters with a knowing twinkle suggest the supposedly simple man is not as foolish as he acts.

The overall plot has similar confusing contradictions, suddenly leaping from amiable slap-stickiness into a lethally black mood in the gangster genre, while the Defendor (who deliberately mis-spells his name but pronounces it correctly at times) switches from a paternal to an emotional attachment to the female interest. Harrelson gets away with it all, his eyes staring dramatically through their mask of black cream, his vocal tone and scripted jokes winning his audience over with righteous self-mockery.

Stebbings kept his day job, and is still screen-acting. Sadly for him, he has no listed writing or directing projects. Sony bought his movie's US distribution rights, but didn't release it. It was shown in a few cinemas by its producers, and went quickly to DVD. The movie and its creator warranted better treatment.