Today at my local United Artists megaplex there are 45 total film screenings. Thirty of those screenings are superhero movies, 24 of them Avengers alone. But even without the biggest piece of content in world history, Shazam and Captain Marvel would still occupy nearly a third of total slots. We’ve come a long way since my dad took me and my siblings to a midnight showing of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002. Now “flying hot people in goofy costumes” is the clear dominant cinematic genre.

I do not like comic book movies. From playful action comedies to grimdark “realist” reimaginings, these superhero franchise installments are vehicles for their own loose ends, locking together like a child’s floor puzzle. And no matter where a film falls on the Shazam-Joker spectrum, it’s perpetuating a hulking multi-billion-dollar meta-franchise so big we have felt the need to add “extended” to “universe,” the word for everything that exists. They are the bubblegum vodka of cultural products: made for undiscriminating adults and/or children, depending on who asks. The dialogue and references in the movies are barely comprehensible to anyone under 14, while the computer-animated visuals are designed to entertain children. In my deeply under-informed view, there has only been one truly good superhero movie in the 21st century: Sky High.

A clean mashup of Mean Girls, Harry Potter, and generic-brand spandex, the 2005 movie Sky High follows high school freshman Will Stronghold (Michael Angarano)—the son of celebrated heroes The Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston)—as he heads into his first year at the titular super school. Like Hogwarts, Sky High is a place apart—it’s literally in the sky—allowing us to reasonably put aside our questions about the relationship between heroes and the regular human world. Unable to manifest any powers at first, Will is laned into sidekick classes (“hero support”) taught by a washed-up Robin-type named “Mr. Boy” (Dave Foley). There, like Cady Heron and Harry Potter, Will befriends some socially marginal weirdos who have seemingly insignificant abilities.

In its narrative construction, Sky High draws far more on high school freshman stories than the lose-win-lose-win-lose-triumph arc we’ve become accustomed to in superhero movies. Russell keeps it especially loose, playing Commander as a dumb jock dad who assumes his son will be Super Man on Campus and buys him an XBox for winning a fight at school. (The football/quidditch equivalent is “Save the Citizen,” a two-on-two P.E. class game with powers allowed and a rag doll civilian at stake. It’s a great scene.)

No high school movie would be complete without a girl-next-door friend, and Sky High has Layla (Danielle Panabaker, herself now part of the “Arrowverse”), a vegetarian pacifist who can control plants but refuses her school’s Sorting Hat type “power placement” exercise because it “sounds fascist” and she “doesn’t believe in the hero-sidekick dichotomy.” Angarano’s Will is clueless about Layla’s crush on him, though as per the teen rom com genre it’s obvious to everyone else. In a very believable move for a 14-year-old boy, he falls for her in turn as soon as he figures out that she already likes him.