A good superhero movie is a hard thing to pull off. What comes across as awesome and entertaining on the pages of comic books often becomes ridiculous and/or downright stupid when it gets translated onto the big screen. It’s easy to draw a superhero and make him or her look cool, but when you actually create that costume, you start to realize just how weird it would be to see someone dressed in spandex and wearing a mask walking down the street. Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, based on the best-selling comic book series by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., manages to avoid being ridiculous by playing with just how ridiculous the idea of being a superhero really is.
The comics had their fair share of problems. Millar often can’t decide whether he’s going to focus on absurd, over-the-top violence or the realistic emotional plights of his protagonists, and the result is a story that flip-flops back and forth without ever being able to make up its mind about which side of the fence it wants to land on. Vaughn avoids this dilemma by focussing almost entirely on the violence and eliminating or altering all of the complicated plot points that made Millar’s story so difficult to classify. The movie maintains a frenetic pace throughout, never giving the audience a chance to sit and think about the ramifications of character decisions before jumping into the next fight scene with reckless abandon.
The story follows Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a high-school loser obsessed with comic books who wonders why no one has ever tried to be a super hero in real life. Deciding that he has what it takes, he creates a costume and starts trying to fight crime (“trying” being the operative word). Despite his initial failures, the capture and broadcast of one of his heroic exploits on YouTube turns him into an Internet sensation and inspires other people to don costumes and begin a life of vigilantism. The two most notable new heroes are Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz). Together these costumed vigilantes find themselves facing off against Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), the leader of a local crime syndicate, in a fight to the death.
To put it simply, this movie belongs to Cage and Moretz. The chemistry between the two is fantastic, and this is some of Cage’s best work in years. He brings the perfect amount of insanity and lovable charm to the role of Big Daddy, and his scenes are some of the movie’s most memorable. Likewise newcomer Chloë Moretz is fantastic as Hit-Girl, managing to simultaneously convey a sense of child-like innocence and the hardened instincts of a trained killer. Hilarious performances by Christopher Mintz-Plasse (as the vigilante Red Mist) and Clark Duke (as Dave’s friend Marty) keep the tone suitably light for what this film wants to be: an action comedy.
The film has garnered a lot of criticism from certain parties, and most of it centres on Moretz’s character. The first time she dons her costume Hit-Girl bursts into a room full of villains and greets them with “Okay you cunts, let’s see what you can do now.” The NY Times started bitching about this before the film was even released, claiming that she “salts her conversation with language so graphic that it would make a biker blanch”. Listen, unless the “biker” we’re talking about is five years old and riding a Schwinn, he’s probably not going to blanch at the word “cunt.” Still, the criticism is understandable; the girl was 12 years old at the time of filming, and she spends most of her screen time either killing or cursing like a sailor. Moretz herself admitted that if she “ever uttered one word that I said in Kick-Ass, I would be grounded for years!” Putting aside the morality of having a 12-year-old portray a foul-mouthed assassin, the bottom line is that this is a movie with a hard R rating. Extreme violence and language are expected (even demanded) from a movie like this. Hell, the movie is called “Kick-Ass”; did you really expect anything different? The bottom line is that if you’re offended by this kind of language and violence, you’re probably never going to see the movie anyway, so stop whining like a fucking idiot about the film being “violence’s answer to kiddie porn” (*dismissive wanking motion*) and go watch The Princess and the Frog or some shit.
The movie does have its drawbacks. Aaron Johnson is pretty forgettable in the titular role; he’s not bad at all, but the part definitely didn’t have to be played by him (whereas it’s difficult to imagine anyone else pulling off Big Daddy or Hit-Girl as well as Cage and Moretz, respectively). A friend pointed out to me that the film definitely has a hard-on for the power of guns; it seems to be saying that all of one’s problems could be solved by just picking up a gun and going after your enemies—Kick-Ass is essentially the most useless of the various vigilantes in the film until he finally picks up a gun. Only once he is armed can he live up to his name. Vaughn eliminated or changed a number of major plot elements, and while the changes work for the movie, as someone who has read the comic it is still always slightly difficult to decide whether or not the changes are for the better.
Overall, despite any drawbacks it might have, Kick-Ass is a really fun movie. If you like mindless violence and frantic action sequences, combined with some great one-liners and a heaping dose of Nicolas Cage insanity, you’re going to love this movie.
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