This is one of the rare movies which actually lives up to its billing: 'Kick-Ass' does, in fact, kick ass. The story of a normal high schooler, who loves comic books a little too much and decides to buy a scuba suit and make himself into the titular super hero, Kick-Ass is a revelation, and more importantly, a genuinely unique addition to the genre of the 'comic-book' movie.
Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your average teenage geek. He loves comic books, is massively socially awkward with the ladies and masturbates a lot. One day, he wonders aloud why more people don't try to be superheroes- and then, after getting mugged one too many times, gets a costume together and tries it. Attempt #1 gets him stabbed and hit by a car- and after recovering (with damage to his nerve endings that lets him take a punch a bit easier), he tries again. This time, his heroics go viral on the internet and Kick-Ass is born.
He quickly discovers that he's not the only superhero in town as he encounters a father-daughter team of Big Daddy (played remarkably well by Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (played by Chloe Moretz, who steals the whole damn movie)-- this duo is out to take down crime boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) who was responsible for putting Big Daddy (now an ex-cop) in jail and indirectly responsible for the death of Big Daddy's wife and Hit Girl's Mom. Kick-Ass quickly realizes that this dynamic duo means business- while he's just a nice guy trying to do some good with his batons- and they make him feel pretty inadequate for awhile. But he quickly gets sucked into their fight- even as D'Amico sets up his son, (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as another superhero to lure them into a trap. The final showdown that ensues is bloody, violent and unlike anything I've ever seen in a comic book movie.
And therein lies the appeal of Kick-Ass: it is unlike anything you've ever seen before in a comic book movie. It's becoming more and more of a problem for the genre, because with a glut of movies, you need to be able to stand out and above the crowd of other masked avengers fighting for a box office take. The Fantastic Four movies were total flops, primarily because they looked like the same old movie that people had seen a thousand times before. Kick-Ass pulls no punches: fighting bad guys is a violent, bloody affair and the good guys don't always come out unscathed- it's gritty, realistic and colorful- exactly the kind of comic book hero that Quentin Tarantino would have loved to make- and Matthew Vaughn had the genius to do it first.
It's also the first comic book movie to ask an important question: what would superheros do in the real world? What would it look like if a normal, everyday person decided to put on a costume and take out bad guys? Kick-Ass takes a fun, unflinching view of that question- making it a worthy addition to the genre. While Watchmen gets into the heads of the superhero archetypes, Kick-Ass wants to know what it would be like when placed into a brutally realistic, pulls-no-punches real world environment. The answer is questionable, to say the least.
Why? Well, most of the criticism swirling around Kick-Ass comes from the portrayal of father-daughter crime fighting duo Big Daddy and Hit Girl. Roger Ebert was especially upset with what he saw as treatment bordering on child abuse (Hit Girl, after all, being just 11)- and to be sure, when an 11 year old girl says the word 'cunt' even in a movie, you tend to sit up and take notice a little bit. When she swirls and runs through the movie like a purple-haired pint sized killing machine, you tend to wonder just how effed up her childhood has been. And for sure, with Mom dead, false imprisonment did a number on Big Daddy. As he is told, in no uncertain terms: he owns his daughter a childhood, because in his obsession for revenge, he does take his daughter and make her into anything but a normal child.
But child abuse? I don't know about that- Robin, of Batman fame was, after all, known as the Boy Wonder originally. Hit Girl fits into the role of 'Girl Wonder' quite nicely- and no one, as far as I know has raised any objections to Batman taking in a kid and turning him into a crime fighter. All the fuss, I suspect, may be due to the fact that Hit Girl is, in fact, a girl. We don't want to see little girls killing people. We don't want to see them getting shot or beaten up- they should, after all, be playing with dolls and braiding their hair. Every superhero out there is a little messed up in the head- and Hit Girl, Big Daddy and Kick Ass are no exceptions, but Hit Girl is scrappy, self-reliant, fiercely independent and can for sure take care of herself- a pint-sized package of kick-ass girl power and propelled by a revelatory performance by Chloe Moretz, she lights up the screen. And while little girls shouldn't probably get too excited about the prospect of killing bad guys- a role model which encourages independence, self-reliance and general empowerment in the way Hit Girl does is a role model I can get behind.
Overall, this movie lived up to its title and then some: Kick-Ass, KICKED ASS!
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