 Defendor 
 
 Directed and written by Peter Stebbings 
 
 Starring Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas 
 
 Classification: 14A 
 
 The old notion that to surrender to the charms of a movie, you need to suspend disbelief in the artifices that make up the movie really gets put to the test in Defendor. At night he becomes Defendor, black-clad battler of crime and/or evil with an arsenal of gadgets that includes jars filled with enraged hornets, a trench club from the First World War, marbles and a surveillance camera that records to VHS tapes. Woody Harrelson is superb as Arthur Poppington, a 40-something man-child who truly believes he is Defendor, self-appointed protector of the citizens of Hamilton from "punks."
– Woody Harrelson plays a deluded superhero in Defendor, Canadian writer-director Peter Stebbings' debut. The filmmaker's compatriots get where he's coming from; critics south of the border, not so much: "Made for $3.5-million, it looks, if anything, cheaper," James Adams writes in the Globe and Mail. But Harrelson's "expressive rubber face and intense blue eyes" paint a "convincing portrait of a lonely, damaged schlub whose moral code and sense of the heroic" come exclusively from comic books. The flick has "a proper pace, well punctuated with laughs at the right time, and outrage and sympathy at others," writes Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star. At its core is Harrelson's "unrelenting seriousness and dedication to the literal truth." Harrelson is "winning," but "Stebbings is more interested in deconstructing heroism than creating a concrete world," Glenn Whipp writes in the Los Angeles Times. The result is that "the film never meshes into something cohesive." "Imagine Woody Harrelson's slaphappy simpleton Woody Boyd from Cheers if he were mad as hell and not planning to take it anymore," David Germain writes for the AP, and you've got Defendor. Intriguing, but "you end up not so much rooting for him as for the psychiatric profession, hoping it lives up to its destiny and gets this nut case off the streets."