I went into Kick-Ass with a chip on my shoulder. I haven’t read the graphic novel Kick-Ass, but I am familiar with some of Mark Millar’s other comic work. I’ve found his stories to be a classic case of style over substance. Writing in a self-described “wide-screen” style, his comic work is mostly a hodge-podge of big action set pieces and grumbling, edgy characters spouting profanity laced dialogue. This is the shock and awe approach to storytelling, cool over character, and the trailers for the film version of Kick-Ass looked to be right in line with that approach. Not to mention that it seemed to contain a lot of stuff I’m really sick of when it comes to modern summer blockbusters, the superhero origin story, wire work laden stunts, over the top action choreography. That post Matrix style of action filmmaking that replaces headshots and middle fingers with glossy, slow motioned visuals and fight sequences that are more ballet than martial art. Well, it turns out I was only half right. Kick-Ass seems to almost contain two separate super hero stories, one I was interested in and one that was the epitome of everything I loathe. If they could have co-existed, I might have found the film to be enjoyable overall, but in my experience they worked to undermine each other and sank what could have been a promising ship.
The story begins by introducing us to mild mannered high school dweeb Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson). He’s invisible to girls, loves reading comic books, and spends most of his time masturbating on the internet. He has a couple of best friends played by Evan Peters and Clark Duke, but they’re never substantial enough to give descriptions to or look up their character’s names. All three of the friends look alike, dress alike, and talk alike. They’re virtually indistinguishable from one another. It works to further cement the main character’s everyman status, but I didn’t find it all that interesting to watch. None of the characters are given even a minor distinguishing feature to set them apart, and the two friend characters never play into the plot of the film in any way. I mean, at the very least couldn’t we have gotten the cookie cutter setup of the crazy wise cracking friend, the uptight nervous friend, and the straight man in the middle? With the way things were presented here, I’m hard pressed to come up with a reason why Peters and Duke were necessary to the story at all. Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays a loner rich kid named Chris D’Amico who frequents the same comic shop as our trio. He plays into the story in a major way later on, but I couldn’t help but feel the more interesting story would have been the lead Dave character and the Chris character meeting as loners, bonding over common interests, and then being put at odds with each other later on due to hero/villain politics. This possible story gets teased at one point, but then is promptly tossed aside. Instead we just get scenes of three bland dorks sitting around and reading comic books with no real character development to be seen.
Lyndsy Fonseca plays Katie, the high school girl who becomes Dave’s love interest. Similar to Dave’s friends, Katie is given no real personality and no definable function in the film’s narrative. As they seem to just be place filler to show that he is a normal guy who has friends, she seems to exist just to show that he’s a normal guy who likes girls. We’re shown that she does some volunteer work, and I guess that was supposed to project the idea that she is a good person and worthy of ending up with our protagonist, but the rest of what takes place during their romance subplot fails to support that position. She shallowly ignores him when she thinks that he’s just a nerd, she only begins talking to him because she hears that he’s gay and she wants to look hip by having a gay friend, and she only becomes involved with him romantically after she finds out that he is famous. Plus, the only thing we’re told about her past is that she is somehow involved with a pretty serious drug dealer and she needs to get Kick-Ass to convince him to stop calling her. It all adds up to make her character come off as pretty shallow, and since we’re not given any sense of her personality or motivation, the Katie character ends up coming off as pretty unlikable. I found myself actively rooting for Dave to dump her and look for someone better. A relationship with her seemed less like a prize to be won and more like a crazy-girl ticking time bomb just waiting to go off and ruin his life. But maybe that’s just me projecting? Regardless, it all becomes a moot point when her character disappears at the end of the second act and never returns in a meaningful way to offer any resolution to the romantic arch at all. She seems to exist just to add to the escapist nature that the story takes on after the first half hour. How about some realism for a change? Cute girls don’t read comic books. Cute girls don’t sit in booths at well-lit comic book shops and sip lattes with the school dorks. I’ve been to comic shops; they don’t even have booths or lattes. They’re dingy and depressing and the only thing you’re going to find there is unkempt Dungeons and Dragons nerds sitting on folding chairs drinking Mountain Dew Code Red and eating Doritos.
Thankfully, the Dave character has a bit more going on in his head than just reading comics and chasing girls. Sick of being ignored and feeling inconsequential, he begins to wonder what would happen if he were to live out the life of a superhero in the real world. Eventually, thought turns to action and Dave makes himself a costume and ventures out to fight some crime. Sure, he might get his ass kicked every once in a while, but what’s the worst that could really happen? This bit of naiveté keeps the beginning of Dave’s transformation into Kick-Ass unique and interesting. This kid has no skills, no fighting ability, no athleticism, and no reason to believe that he might succeed in physical confrontations with masked criminals, but he throws himself in the middle of the fire regardless. The first bit of action is tension filled and keeps you guessing. What would really happen if an average young guy went out and tried to fight crime? Surely, he would get himself killed. The way this bit of the story plays out is really affecting. Dressed as Kick-Ass, Dave confronts a couple of would be car thieves and dares them to take him on. The resulting fight is clumsy, brutal, and violent. Dave takes a serious beating and then gets stabbed in the stomach. The stabbing is treated like a big deal, it comes suddenly, it instantly ends the fight, Kick-Ass bleeds real blood, and looks like he’ll be dead without help in minutes. My heart sank as the knife plunged in, where would the story go from here? This was the part of the story I was interested in. Unfortunately, seconds later, Dave is splattered all over the street by a fast moving car and the film, in an instant, goes from being a unique look at what it might be like for somebody to try and fight crime in a real world, to an over the top, clichéd, action soaked superhero origin story. After receiving massive reconstructive surgery, where doctors inserted metal plates throughout much of Dave’s body, he emerges not crippled, immobile, and severely arthritic, but instead a bit tougher because of his metal parts and able to take more punishment due to deadened nerves. In one sequence everything unique and intriguing that the film had going for it is thrown out the window and we are placed firmly in the realm of escapist fantasy.
The introduction of the characters Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nic Cage) take this cheesy story tone to new, possibly unheard of levels. Big Daddy is a former police officer who, in an attempt at gaining revenge for his wife’s death, has trained himself and his 11 year old daughter into killing machines. Nic Cage, as you might expect if you’ve seen his modern work, plays his character completely insane. He instructs his daughter about the instruments and methods of killing with a cheerful, Ward Cleaver demeanor. Consequently, material that could have played as disturbing takes on a farcical, ridiculous feel. When he’s behind the mask of Big Daddy he speaks in a very broad, silly impression of Adam West. Cage’s choices as an actor have become so off the wall that I legitimately question the man’s sanity. Why do the directors he works with allow him to continue to turn in such sloppy, slap in the face performances? Instead of elevating the questionable, B-Level genre scripts he’s been choosing with his star power and acting, he’s been completely sinking them with cringe worthy turns. Does he have so much power in Hollywood that he can do whatever he wants unquestioned, or has he turned his life into some sort of avant-garde performance art in the vein of someone like Andy Kaufman? His films have become completely fascinating to watch in a sort of WWII Germany, “how did everyone let this happen?” way.
Chloe Moretz is a little ball of energy and an absolute delight. Hit-Girl is foul-mouthed, physically dangerous, and super enthusiastic about killing criminals. Moretz plays the role with a wink and a smile, and a competence beyond her years. Her character, as it is written, couldn’t have been better realized. Whether or not it should have been written the way it was is another story altogether. The whole Hit-Girl and Big Daddy subplot is Léon if it had been conceived by the future-world imbeciles from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. The characters are super human level fighters, especially the 11 year-old girl who casually dismembers thug after thug without so much as breaking a sweat for much of the movie. Instead of looking at all into the psychology of someone who would train their daughter to be a killer, or a little girl who has been denied her childhood in a horrible way, Hit-Girl and Big Daddy are there solely to get laughs and high fives from the audience. Maybe this should be expected from a movie called Kick-Ass, but when the film starts out looking like it’s going to be a much more realistic, interesting look at comic book tropes, I couldn’t help but be disappointed with the developments that came from these characters, who initially felt completely out of place, but eventually completely took over the rest of the film with their stupidity.
Both Kick-Ass and Big Daddy find themselves running afoul of crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). D’Amico is a pretty generic big boss bad guy, and doesn’t offer much to the film other than a reason for all the heroes to come together. He sits behind a desk, he plots, he says he wants the protagonists dead, and that’s about it. What could have been potentially more interesting was Mintz-Plasse’s character Chris D’Amico. Chris is Frank’s son. He’s isolated and lonely due to his father’s line of work. Everywhere he goes he is accompanied by a bodyguard and not allowed to interact with anyone his own age. Because of this he spends his time escaping into movies and comics. His dad, being the only person he ever spends time with, sort of becomes his role model by default. Chris idolizes his father and wants nothing more than to be accepted by him as the heir to the family throne. In order to impress his dad he offers to go under cover, disguising himself as a superhero named Red Mist and luring Kick-Ass into a trap. This could have all been pretty interesting had the character been played as conflicted. If we would have gotten some insight into his joy at actually becoming the type of superhero he always idolized, or the regret he had when he had to sacrifice that life and his new friend, Kick-Ass, in order to please his father, it could have added a lot of weight and intrigue into the story. Instead the character is underwritten, doesn’t get enough screen time, and comes off as being more thoughtless and stupid than he does conflicted.
I guess most of my complaints about the film come down to a matter of tone. What, exactly, was Kick-Ass trying to be? Was it a more gritty superhero story told in a real world setting, or was it a nihilistic, ultra violent romp that wanted to achieve nothing more than making a teenage movie going audience yell, “Kick-Ass kicks ass!” when they come out of the theater? Early dialogue tells us that this is going to be a real world story, but everything else points in a different direction. The color palette of the film is rich and eye popping. It’s visually pleasing but gives the film a fairy tale look; this flies directly in the face of that bumbling, bloody first attempt at becoming a “real” superhero that lands Kick-Ass in the hospital. Kick-Ass’s early fight scenes are fun and unique. He’s clearly untrained and clumsy, as are the criminals he fights against. He takes more punishment than he dishes out and he doesn’t look like a typical hero at all. But, by the end of the film we’re treated to fight sequences where one person takes on fifty. There are bazookas, jet packs, and any other ridiculous form of weaponry you could think of. At one point, a scene where Hit-Girl takes out a room full of bad guys is shot in a first person, night vision perspective. The scene looks like it could, literally, be screen captures from a first person shooter video game. This might point to a cartoony, irreverent take on violence, and in a less heady film that might be perfectly acceptable and a good time, but Kick-Ass never gets that tone quite right. The deaths, rapid fire and one after another should feel fake and fun, just like playing a videogame where questions of reality or responsibility never enter into it; but the deaths are so brutal and the gore so visually gruesome that the action never takes on that escapist feel that it’s shooting for. We watch men scream, beg for their lives, and then get killed in graphic but realistic bloody splatters while other characters laugh and quip like it’s nothing. This is a far cry from the 20 foot-high blood spurts of a movie like Kill Bill. Everything here is presented as too real for us to take it as a joke. At one point we watch a character that we’re supposed to have an attachment to scream as he is burned alive, and afterwards it’s treated as nothing more than a consequence free plot development by the other characters. After watching an hour of an 11 year old girl be an invincible martial arts machine, suddenly she is kicked in the face by a grown man, goes down to the ground hard, bleeds, and things become very real and very disturbing out of nowhere. If Kick-Ass had just been 100% cartoony 100% of the time then all of the violence would have been fine, but it’s the few moments here and there where they shoot for realist brutality that ruin the tone completely. The film can’t seem to decide what it wants to be, so when it shoots for irreverent what it achieves is more often inappropriate.
I really didn’t like this movie at all. I feel like it’s important, however, to fess up that I can imagine how a lot of people could like it. The tonal ambiguity and underwritten characters turned me off, but I don’t think that those will be sticking points for everybody. The superhero origin structure and over the top action sequences may be things that I’m terribly exhausted with, but there’s a large audience of people who can’t get enough of them. The film looked good, the acting wasn’t bad, and the action sequences were at least edited well. As somebody who this movie probably wasn’t aimed towards, I came out of it feeling like it earned somewhere around two stars, but I can see how somebody who was more in it’s wheelhouse might have walked out of the theater thinking that it was hovering much closer to four stars. In the end, even I can’t hate on it completely. While it kept much of the wire work and glossy feel of post-Matrix Hollywood, at least it tried to inject some of the headshots and middle fingers of action movies’ golden years back into the mix. The efforts came off as kind of tacky and gross, but they weren’t completely unappreciated
