Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot
The good remake of The Toxic Avenger, with added anime referenced for good measure.
The protagonist is a low-life low-ranking thug for a lower status mafia. He lives in a crap apartment, filled with porn DVDs and yellow yogurts. After a botched burglary, he escapes to the Tiber and inadvertently dives into a toxic sludge that makes him sick for a while. He reports back to the middle mafioso, which takes him to a job where he gets shot and falls 9 stories. Turns out he is now Wolverine without the skeleton.
His boss had a daughter with mental problems after her mother was murdered, and as it transpires afterwards, a series of sexual abuses. He saves her from more abuse when her father’s boss come searching for him. She uses an obscure anime show as therapy, and fantasises his saviour is a character on the show. From that point forward, she grows on him and turns him into a better person.
Meanwhile, there’s a subplot about the hardcore Camorra clashing with the local mobsters, since the locals are getting screwed over by the protagonist.
During the climax, the protagonist loses his new tether to a normal life, while the local mob boss gets offed by the Neapolitans and gains powers on the same river stretch. He tries to blow a football stadium during the Roman derby, but Jeeg stops him, initiating a life as your friendly neighbour super hero.
The recurring joke that the local mobster is an ex-Big Brother contestant only gets funnier when you discover Ilenia Pastorelli, who plays the anime-obsessed girl, is in fact an ex-Grande Fratello competitor. The protagonist was also on Casino Royale as the mook wanting to blow up the Airbus A380 expy.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.