So You Won't Have To: Kick-Ass

Ladies and germs, the only thing I was glad about after watching Kick-Ass was that I didn't have to pay for it. If it gives you some idea of how much I disliked this movie, I nearly gave up during the first thirty minutes. It really is a smarmy, "wink wink look at how clever I am" kind of film, which is all the more obnoxious because Kick-Ass never earns its sense of superiority to "comic book films."

The story is pretty basic: Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is our narrator and protagonist. He's just your average high school loser that everybody ignored (with good reason) who reads comic books and is picked on by his only friends (Clark Duke and Evan Peters) for wanting to be a super hero. But Dave buys some scuba gear online, gets some batons, and decides to become Kick-Ass, a home made vigilante. Because this movie is clever, he's stabbed during his first attempt to fight crime, then hit by a car.

Since he asks the paramedic to take off his uniform so no one finds out, everybody at school thinks he's gay because... well, I'm actually tired of this already. What you need to know is that now Dave / Kick-Ass has a bunch of metal plates and dead nerve endings so he can't feel as much pain. Hence, Kick-Ass still sucks at fighting crime, but he can't feel it. Not that this improves anything, but we're stuck with this lame hero.

Even the movie secretly knows that no one cares about Kick-Ass, but in their infinite wisdom, the other protagonist(s) still don't get that much screen time - and when they do, the wrong character gets the spotlight. Look, I understand that for anyone who never saw Leon (The Professional), the idea of a young girl cursing and killing people might seem "edgy" or "bad-ass", but give me a break. Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) exists only to violate all of the "real world" rules that Dave sets up in his narration.

If you don't believe me, reconcile the sequences where Kick-Ass gets the shit kicked out of him with Hit Girl's fight scene near the end of the film. The one you've seen in the "red band" trailer where she's flipping around and throwing clips in the air that magically land in her gun at exactly the right moment. Or the jetpack with twin Gatling guns that Kick-Ass uses to bail Hit Girl out with. I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure that the recoil from two mini-Gatlings would be enough to send anyone hovering in a jetpack against the nearest building.

But I digress. There are so many stupid things happening in this movie that I haven't even discussed the tone or the villains, or my favorite character, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage). Let's cover Big Daddy and the D'Amico family briefly, as they're the only remotely interesting parts of the film. After we watch Dave blather on about how he doesn't have a heroic backstory or any crap like that, but he still wants to be Kick-Ass, we meet Damon MacCready, who has a genuinely interesting comic book story. He was a detective that got on the wrong side of crime boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), so D'Amico framed him and sent him to jail. While he was in jail, MacCready's wife died giving birth to Mindy, his daughter, and when Damon got out, he swore vengeance.

MacCready pooled all of his resources to become Big Daddy and brainwashed trained Mindy to become Hit Girl. What I like about Big Daddy is there's a logic to his vigilante style: he stays funded by stealing money from the criminals he kills, so he can maintain an arsenal in order to fight crime in the most protected way possible. He dresses up like Batman, wears a fake moustache on top of his real moustache, and speaks like Adam West when he's Big Daddy. I don't know how much of this was Cage and how much of it was writer / director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), but I'm leaning Cage. It's his kind of crazy, and it stands out as one of the few entertaining parts of Kick-Ass. Alas, Big Daddy is just barely in the movie; instead we're stuck with Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, and Red Mist*.

Mark Strong is also pretty good as the exasperated Frank D'Amico. He really seems like a vicious thug that rose through the ranks of organized crime and is now just kind of holding it together. He's so bad at hiding what he actually does that both his wife and son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) know exactly what he means when he says "gotta do business", and he continually calls his Police mole Detective Gigante (Xander Berkeley) at the station. He really doesn't care which super hero is messing with his business as long as his men get it taken care of, and their failure to do so is a source of comedy later in the film. Frank is, if anything, the most realistic character in a movie that seems to want to be realistic but then fetishizes Hit Girl calling guys "cunts" and "douchebags". Ha-ha, get it? Because she's only eleven!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. To give you some idea of just how smart Kick-Ass thinks it is, let's look at one of the film's throw-away gags. As Dave and his friends are heading into the movies at the same time that Frank and Chris D'Amico are, the camera holds over a scrolling marquee that reads "Now Showing: The Spirit 3."

Okay, I don't know if this was Matthew Vaughn or Lionsgate (who distributed after Vaughn self-financed the film) at work, but the joke doesn't even make sense. For starters, what is it even saying? That The Spirit was a great movie and in this alternate universe, justice was served and they made two more of them?

No wait, that doesn't make sense, because Dave's narration (not to mention the first act of the film) make it abundantly clear that this is not some alternate universe, this is the real world where nobody tries to dress up like super heroes, hence the excitement, YouTube videos, and Myspace pages needed to get the word out about Kick-Ass.

So we are in the real world, where The Spirit sucked and nobody saw it and there's a pretty good reason there was no The Spirit 2 or 3. So what exactly is the joke? "Ha-ha, get it? We know everybody hated The Spirit, but these guys are probably going to see that movie because comic book nerds will go see any crap based on a comic strip!" Wait, aren't those comic nerds your target audience? Oh, right. I forgot. Kick-Ass is a shitty movie.

Hopefully, this satisfies your curiosities. Kick-Ass apparently isn't drawing as many of those rabid comic book nerds as it thought it would, despite open love letters comparing it to Taxi Driver or lauding its subversive charms. I'm sorry, but no. Kick-Ass never earns the kudos it so openly applauds itself for, and it's not doing anything interesting with Comic Book movies since it can't actually decide whether it's deconstructing or reifying the tropes of the genre. I suspect it'll have a more sustained audience on DVD, but I hope not. At best, Kick-Ass deserves to be movie marquee joke in a comparably lousy film in two years.


* The reason you don't see much of Red Mist in the trailers is because Christopher Mintz-Plasse only appears as Red Mist in order to trick Kick-Ass into giving Frank information on Big Daddy. He's a totally superfluous character in his "hero" form and out of disguise, and really only seems to exist so they can close out Kick-Ass with a reference to Spider-Man.