A1 Movie Reviews

Kick-Ass is lewd, crude, and filled with enough lethal vigilante justice to send more traditional (read: older) comic fans running for the exits. However, those familiar with the source material shouldn’t be shocked. During his acclaimed career, the author of Kick-Ass, Scottish-born Mark Millar, has written scenes featuring superhuman domestic violence, cannibalism, rape, mass murder, and even sodomy courtesy of a jackhammer. But does the author’s shameless self-promotion and director Matthew Vaughn’s love of graphic violence mean that Kick-Ass isn’t an entertaining look at a more brutal side of superheroics? Not at all.

Yes, the film takes every opportunity to subvert the four-color world of straight arrows like Superman, but it always does so with a loving wink and nod. This is a movie for fanboys, pure and simple. Anyone else may or may not get what’s going on.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your average cinematic high school geek. He likes comic books, wears glasses, hangs with his also-geeky friends, and pines for a hottie (Lyndsy Fonseca) who barely knows he exists. Tired of a life of normalcy and the perceived cowardice of the masses, Dave fashions a costume from a SCUBA diving suit and becomes the masked hero known as Kick-Ass. It’s not long, however, before he gets his own ass kicked, and the incident leaves him with metal plates in his bones and a greater-than-average threshold for pain.

Continuing the good fight, he soon encounters a masked, father/daughter duo known as Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), the latter a bewigged 11-year-old moppet who permanently dispatches bad guys with a smirk. They’ve set their sights on crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), the drug-dealing bastard responsible for Big Daddy’s dismissal from the NYPD and stretch in prison. But Frank’s sheltered son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), is also a comic book fan, and he devices a way to stop the lethal pair by using Kick-Ass as a dupe.

Throughout the film, much is made about normal citizens doing nothing to help their fellow man (unless immortalizing them on YouTube counts). The finger-wagging actually goes light on the public, however, as a real-life superhero would draw far more media attention than what occurs on the screen. I can imagine city block after city block crawling with paparazzi, each looking to snap a photo of Kick-Ass and sell it to the tabloids. Would Paris Hilton deem him “hot”? We can only wonder.

While voice-overs can often be the sign of a weak, unimaginative script (The Shawshank Redemption excepted), it works in Kick-Ass due to the comic book tradition of pages being peppered with thought balloons and captions to express the hero’s inner turmoil. While it clearly violates the rule of “show, don’t tell,” the film’s cheeky nature covers up for much of this. Director Vaughn’s talent for keeping the story from getting bogged down also helps.

Moments of violence within the picture often ring hollow thanks to the story’s snarky tone, but Kick-Ass would’ve needed to be a five-star masterpiece in order to have their cake and eat it too. And I suspect that filling the blood-soaked action scenes with pathos were the furthest thing from the minds of the filmmakers (or author Millar, for that matter). Still, this causes a pivotal death scene to fall flat on its face, and I sometimes wish the script by Vaughn and Jane Goldman would’ve been a little more Millar and a little less Diablo Cody.

This is especially true during a sub-plot in which Dave pretends to be gay in order to get closer to his high school crush. It goes nowhere fast, and it’s inclusion is obviously designed to lure in more female viewers. While they were at it, the screenwriters should’ve had Dave form a friendship with the crusty-yet-caring senior citizen down the street. I’m certain they could’ve taught each other important life lessons, and the studio might’ve made a few buck from the over-60 crowd.

Mark Strong and Chloe Moretz are the big winners among the cast, although Strong is hampered by sharing scenes with Christopher Mintz-McLovin, an actor simply not up to the level of the big-screen British chameleon. Still, his Frank D’Amico manages to be both magnetic and terrifying during his limited time on the screen. He loves his son, cherishes their time together as a family, but also harbors feelings of disappointment for his perceived weakness.

Hit-Girl, a pre-teen killing machine, is far more interesting than the title character, if for no other reason than we don’t have voice-overs telling us her every thought. As she vaults over furniture and pumps round after round into the bad guys, you just have to wonder what’s going on under that adorable purple wig. Imagine that Thomas Wayne survived, became a hardcore vigilante, and pulled his young son, Bruce, into the life. That’s Hit-Girl, folks.

Moretz handles the physical scenes with a believability far beyond that of most adult actresses, and Vaughn can take partial credit for the framing of the scenes. She also displays more raw attitude than any male in the cast, although it’s hard not to give her this honor when words like “cock” and “cunt” are coming out of her mouth. Tweens will view Hit-Girl as a sex symbol, liberal-minded viewers will regard her as one of the more interesting grrls to burst onto the screen, and everyone else will be mortified that a film would depict a child (a) committing murder, (b) dressing in a costume that has a fetish quality to it, and ( c) uttering words that would get the average 12-year-old grounded.

Cage does an adequate job, but Hit-Girl’s other father figure (and Big Daddy’s former partner), Sergeant Marcus Williams (Omari Hardwick), gets buried beneath the film’s obsession with tacking on a love story. That’s too bad, as a few scenes between the two would’ve given Moretz even more opportunity to display her already formidable talent.

The soundtrack provides a major punch to the on-screen events. From Ennio Morricone’s theme from For a Few Dollars More to a cover of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation,” Kick-Ass is loaded down with tunes that convey a, well, kick ass attitude. “In the House – In a Heartbeat” from 28 Days Later was a pleasant surprise, and you’ve never heard “An American Trilogy” by Elvis until it’s accompanied by the sound of twin Gatling guns.

Kick-Ass offers a perverse blend of superhero worship, outlandish violence, and a coming-of-age story. It’s a delicious piece of cotton candy entertainment: light, airy, and sweet. But if a sequel ever gets made, I hope it’s titled Hit-Girl, because there’s little question who the real star of the show is.

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