So far this summer, I've had my brain pummeled by Robert Downey Jr. flying around in a techno-suit, Adam Sandler as an invincible (and priapic) former Mossad agent, Steve Carell as a nerdy indestructible super spy, Harrison Ford as a Teflon 60-year-old archaeologist, Edward Norton as the incredibly angry green dude — which I admit I missed but saw the ads. I did, however, catch an early screening of Will Smith as a hung-over but still unbeatable superhero. And I still have "The Dark Knight" and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" to go.

I don't know how many more superhero movies I can take.

Some were good superhero movies. Some were bad superhero movies. Yet, they're all beginning to merge as a very long series of whammies, and fireballs and ironic quips. In my mind, which might have been addled by the decibel level in the theaters, Hancock is taking down Indiana Jones. Zohan canoodles and karate chops Agent 99. My butt is kicked. Your butt is kicked. Sigh.

With "Hancock," which zooms into theaters this week, Hollywood has gone all meta, giving us a superhero — Smith — who has lost his mojo, a drunken power ranger having an existential crisis. No fear, here's a sunny P.R. guy (Jason Bateman) to the rescue. I laughed at Hancock's politically incorrect dismissal of superhero couture, and did fall sway to the cosmic time-twisting conundrums of superhero love. As superhero dramas go, I'd give it three capes.

But the pure boom-boom factor of the genre made me feel bludgeoned. Again.

OK, maybe it's just me. I'm not a 14-year-old boy; so all this superhero firepower isn't hitting me in the solar plexus. But I did buy my 5-year-old son a whole array of superhero underpants recently. He really likes wearing Hulk on his butt.

Sometime he wears his underpants backward so he can just look down and see his jolly green friend more easily. Maybe it comforts him on some level. Empowers him.

I've been told by a bevy of pop culture watchers that my son is more in tune with the collective unconscious than me. Author Peter Biskind, who has written books about movies and culture in the 1950s, '70s and '90s, assures me that superheroes return with bad times. Superman reached iconic status during World War II. The gas crisis and economic malaise of the Carter years begat Superman again — with the Christopher Reeve incarnation. And now, well, given the subprime mortgage crisis, the morass in Iraq and oil prices, we need Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man, all at once.

REASSURING FIGURES

"Who doesn't want a superhero when the world is in trouble?" asks marketing guru Jane Buckingham of the Youth Intelligence Group, who studies young people. "Who doesn't want somebody to come save the day when the world is a mess?"

Janine Basinger, a film historian from Connecticut Wesleyan University, has a slightly different take on it. "We all want a daddy, don't we? We really want a big daddy to fix it. These are reassuring figures."

Basinger notes that the recent wave of superheroes is in part driven by the technological revolution in movie making.

"When I was little, a superhero movie was either a B-movie or a serial," he said. "You couldn't do it right. You didn't have the special effects. You didn't have the CGI. In my day, George Reeves was Superman. You could see the wires holding him up and his leotard was baggy. As kids, we found that a hoot. Now it's different. You can make the comic book work come to life."

Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer who produced "Hancock" along with action maestro Michael Mann ("Heat," "Miami Vice"), points out that the psychology of Hollywood's superheroes has deepened of late.

"Our view of heroes is evolving," he said. "They used to be pretty two-dimensional, and just good guys or gals. Now they seem to be human beings that have stumbled and have to find their way again. We want our heroes a little more moody. We want our heroes to struggle a little more and earn the chance to be righteous, and not just imagine it's a birthright."

Indeed, as experienced with Frank Miller's revisionist Batman graphic novel of the late '80s, superheroes routinely have faced crises of confidence. They cry now. They need to pop Xanax before they get back to the hard task of saving civilization. But clearly, rescue fantasies are in the air.