I actually liked both films, Titan AE was the weaker of them, but I felt that Mystery Men rocked!
Mystery Men is wonderful and completely, catastrophically missed the superhero deconstruction boom of the last ten years; I'm not sure there's anything I dislike about it except the fact that it's obscure even for a cult film and misrepresented even by people who supposedly liked it. Fantastic character-actor cast, time-skewing worldbuilding that doesn't feel the need to explain itself, like Walter Hill with Streets of Fire (1984) or Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995), a script that does all the right things without ever turning into formula, and a stupidly high level of quotability. You just kind of sit around afterward running your favorite lines. Titan A.E. needed one last pass on the script so that its characters would say less clichéd things to each other, but it packs a surprising density of grimy, plausible worldbuilding into its animation: I have very rarely seen any space opera take the realities of zero-g physics into account, much less introduce them first for comedy and then repurpose the gag into action, and the handling of sequences like the cat-and-mouse in the ice rings was amazing. It suffers from the disjoint between animation styles, but I got used to it. And I liked some of the things it leaves out. It doesn't matter, for example, how Cale's father died. No one could ever believably tell him, anyway.
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Mystery Men is wonderful and completely, catastrophically missed the superhero deconstruction boom of the last ten years; I'm not sure there's anything I dislike about it except the fact that it's obscure even for a cult film and misrepresented even by people who supposedly liked it. Fantastic character-actor cast, time-skewing worldbuilding that doesn't feel the need to explain itself, like Walter Hill with Streets of Fire (1984) or Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995), a script that does all the right things without ever turning into formula, and a stupidly high level of quotability. You just kind of sit around afterward running your favorite lines. Titan A.E. needed one last pass on the script so that its characters would say less clichéd things to each other, but it packs a surprising density of grimy, plausible worldbuilding into its animation: I have very rarely seen any space opera take the realities of zero-g physics into account, much less introduce them first for comedy and then repurpose the gag into action, and the handling of sequences like the cat-and-mouse in the ice rings was amazing. It suffers from the disjoint between animation styles, but I got used to it. And I liked some of the things it leaves out. It doesn't matter, for example, how Cale's father died. No one could ever believably tell him, anyway.