The Invisible Boy’s skills, meanwhile, are a little less impressive than they first seem. “I have the power to turn invisible,” explains Mitchell, “but only when no one is looking. So if you’re looking at me, I can’t turn invisible. If I look at myself, I turn visible again. Are you following me..?”

Mystery Man No 6, The Sphinx, is a man of mystery, plain and simple. “Mystery is a superpower in itself,” says Studi. “You know, the girls were using it in high school.” And finally, what The Shoveler - who is always borrowing his son’s roller-blading kneepads and being told to grow up by his wife - does is pretty much self-explanatory. “He shovels really well,” is how Macy puts it.

Janeane Garofalo as The Bowler (with her late father’s skull in her deadly ball).

Armed with a few extra tricks - including a canned tornado, a ‘blame thrower’ and a machine that shrinks people’s clothes while they’re still wearing them - the Mystery Men are now ready to tackle Casanova Frankenstein...

Interestingly enough, none of the cast members of Mystery Men were comic-book fans before they made the movie. “I was not really interested in comics at all,” says Usher. “I was kind of into surfing.” “The only comic I read as a kid was Mad magazine,” says Garofalo. So what everyone responded to was not the comic-book cult: it was the array of sad, strange and strangely loveable characters. Usher hopes it will be the same for the audience.

“In reading this script about superheroes who can’t get themselves arrested, I found heart,” he says. “There was a sense of community and humanity and you could bring the audience and the screen close together. I found a film that would be interesting with a wonderful visual style, as well as full of humanity and great characters.

Kel Mitchell as Invisible Boy, who can only turn invisible so long as no one is watching.

“I think that’s the most exciting aspect: that you’re going to go and see these characters and identify with them and not go to another big blow-up, smash-up film. Yeah, there’s action, but it’s not action for action’s sake. I’m not gearing the whole movie to one climactic scene: I’m making this movie so that people can go there and feel like they’re part of something.”

Which more or less went for the actors, too. “The Shakespeare in Love troupe was a pretty amazing bunch,” sums up Rush, “and I tend to think of this cast as being like the American version of that.”