“Dominate, Cat, dominate! “

Justin’s rating: I go Gen active every morning when I get my coffee

Justin’s review: Comics started to get really wild in the ’90s with several contenders emerging to take a swing at Marvel and DC. Outfits like Image and WildStorm attempted to make their own superhero universes and succeeded to various extents — including getting their own feature films like Spawn and Tank Girl.

Now I wasn’t that familiar with Jim Lee’s Gen¹³ outside of seeing some rather… provocative… covers at the comic book store, but that could’ve been different had a Disney-backed cinematic version of this universe actually come out in America. However, Jim Lee sold WildStorm to DC around that time, leading Disney to largely shelve Gen¹³ as a result.

But shelve ain’t “dead” and this 1998 animated flick eventually got a second lease on life thanks to the internet.

Mind you, this isn’t a kids sugary superhero movie — there’s plenty of blood, skin, swearing, and more mature themes within. People get their heads shot off, legs broke by telekinetic powers, and more.

Caitlin Fairchild (Alicia Witt) is a brilliant college student who’s ignorant of the fact that her parents were super-beings manufactured and imprisoned by a secret agency. When this same agency that comes recruiting in the guise of a special school, Caitlin naively agrees to head off to its secret installation and become the unwitting subject of experimentation.

Of course, it never goes badly when nefarious organizations take rebellious youth and turn them into superheroes that they order to do their bidding. But considering that this place wants to topple the government with the “Gen 13” batch of latest recruits, it’s probably a good thing that the teens stage an impromptu insurrection of their own.

Caitlin is the first to go “gen active,” growing into an Amazonian build and developing super strength. Her best buds Roxy (EG Daily) and Grunge (Flea) quickly follow, gaining the abilities to manipulate gravity and mimic surface elements, respectively. But standing between them and escape are many trigger-happy guards, sinister project lead Ivana (Lauren Lane), and Caitlin’s psychic half-brother Threshold (Mark Hamill).

Pretty much the whole movie is the trio fighting to escape the facility as they learn more about their powers, the Gen 13 project, and a mysterious ally named Lynch (John de Lancie). The ending clearly set the stage for either a sequel or a TV series. I think the limited scope of the film was generally wise, keeping the story lean and action-packed, although it accomplished this at the expense of cutting out a couple of members of the team. And anyone who grew up on Batman: The Animated Series or similar DC television shows will feel at home with the animation style here.

Gen¹³ is a jumbled bag of entertainment, for sure. The cleaned-up bootleg copy that’s made the rounds on the internet still has some visual and audio issues, and that’s before contending with some pretty bad line readings (Grunge and Helga are the worst offenders here). It’s obviously trying to toe the line on being an adult-oriented superhero movie without quite going into full-on R-rating territory, which leads to weird semi-censored nudity, quick cutaways during violent moments so that you don’t quite know what happened, and a tone that can’t quite settle between teenage hijinks and grown-up seriousness. You might also want to be prepared for a bizarre soundtrack that occasionally goes absolutely berserk for no good reason.

Is it worth seeing? I’m a huge EG Daily fan (shout out to her musical performances in Summer School and Better Off Dead), and so hearing her voice Roxy made this personally worth the time to see it. But even if I pushed that aside, Gen¹³ is a generally high-quality outing that brims with squandered potential. Go Gen active!

Intermission!

• Using superpowers can make you throw up blood
• Professors love it when you show them up in class
• Helga’s accent makes me want to shove q-tips deep into my ears
• The weirdest training montage music ever
• Showers are a good place for a secret smoke
• Caitlin totally hulks out
• That’s quite a fart