Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
5/30/10
I am deeply conflicted about
this movie. Kick-Ass arrives at the crest of a tidal wave
of hype, some of which was clearly ridiculous before it even got here (it
would force future superhero movies into a mode of R-rated “realism” because
it's so much better than the piddling likes of Iron
Man and The Dark Knight), while others
had me genuinely excited (general raves from the SXSW film festival, where
it screened). Today, it stands at #146 on the IMDB
list of the top-rated movies of all time, and it does seem to have
struck a chord with a certain kind of fan. Problem is, I've seen
it now, and while a key subplot indeed represents a challenging deconstruction
of the superhero mythos, the main throughline is more like an 80's “kid
puts on a superhero costume to get the girl” comedy with 2010 levels of
profanity and violence. At its' best, Kick-Ass is very good,
but more often it's merely adequate, and sometimes it's so amazingly self-satisfied
with its' own alleged transgressiveness I wanted to smack it upside the
head. This isn't a bad movie, but man, oh man is it ever over-hyped,
even by itself.
Teen Dave Lizewski (Aaron
Johnson) is utterly average: invisible to girls, neither an achiever
nor a failure, passing his time at a comic book shop with his two similarly
unexceptional friends (Clark Duke & Evan Peters) while pining away
for out-of-his-league Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca). Then, one day, Dave
gets an idea, a crazy idea to fight crime himself in a self-made superhero
costume under the name Kick-Ass. The first time he tries it is a
brutal failure: stabbed in the gut and struck by a car, he ends up
in the hospital and loses so much nerve function his inability to experience
pain could be called a superpower. And so he returns to “duty”, and
actually succeeds in fighting off some goons beating up a guy while a restaurant
full of cell phone cameras watch. Now, Kick-Ass belongs to YouTube,
and amid a growing national fascination, Dave sets up a website where his
heroic alter-ego can connect with folks in need of crimefighting.
Meanwhile, he becomes friends with Katie, who views him as a charity case
after the beating and thinks he's gay. He encourages her to ask Kick-Ass'
help with a drug dealer who's been bothering her, but the confrontation
proves just how in over his head the “superhero” really is: until
all the goons about to kill him are themselves slaughtered by a masked
twelve-year-old calling herself Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). She's
teamed with her father Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) to strike at the criminal
empire of mobster Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Big Daddy is really
Damon Macready, an ex-cop framed by D'Amico, who's devoted his time since
release from prison to constructing a mad superhero fantasy that would
make training his daughter to kill into a game. D'Amico believes
the “superhero” attacking his business must be Kick-Ass, and his son Chris
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has an idea to draw him out: create his
own superhero identity and seek Kick-Ass' help. Dave is only too
happy to join “Red Mist” in fighting crime, but he has no idea how far
in over his head he'll be once real criminals spring their trap.
The storyline with the Macreadys
lives up to Kick-Ass' hype, so perverse and disturbing as it takes
cornerstones of so many superhero origin stories (framed man forced to
fight crime from behind a mask, a superhero's child trained to follow in
their footsteps) and plays them out to outrageous extremes. Cage
and Moretz are great, he affecting an Adam West demeanor behind his mask
that makes him seem utterly mad while she cusses like a sailor and divvies
out homicidal violence without losing the essential sense that she's just
a little girl. Hard to say how much Damon identifies with the Big
Daddy persona, but he has gone so far as to write and illustrate his own
comic book to sell vengeful murder to his child as noble heroism.
This is good stuff, and Kick-Ass' real claim to fame is that it
has a better sense than any movie I've seen of how much costumed crimefighting
would be indistinguishable from homicidal madness in a real-world setting.
Problem is, the movie's not
“about” Bid Daddy and Hit Girl per se, it's about Kick-Ass, and shorn of
its high-quality subplot, his tale isn't really worth seeing. Yeah,
the language is raw and Dave takes (and hands out) a lot of beatings, but
what we see here is nothing but a sub-par teen sex comedy where the hook
is the hero dressing up as a masked crimefighter. There's no depth
at all to Dave's character, he's barely anything but a human-shaped black
cutout surrounded by a dotted line encouraging the movie's teen viewers
to insert themselves in his place. And none of the performances in
this wing of the story are good enough to elevate material like Katie becoming
Dave's “friend” because she thinks he's gay and may have been molested
by his attackers. Fonseca, a 23-year-old actress who has light years
more luck here seeming to be a teen than she did in Hot
Tub Time Machine, is sweet enough in her role, and Johnson has a few
good moments when paired with Moretz near the end, but there's not a moment
in the movie when I felt I could see the wheels turning in the heads of
its teen characters. And the sheer amount of good luck Dave and his
pals have both in combat and romance would be laughable were it not so
clear the movie is a wish-fulfillment machine masquerading as great cinema.
Director Matthew Vaughn and
his co-writer Jane Goldman made the splendid, tonally sophisticated fantasy
romance Stardust a couple years back, but Kick-Ass
is mostly content to point the camera at outrageous stuff and let it play
out. The script seems to know that costumed crimefighting would be
mental illness of the highest order (Dave's best line is about how his
compulsion to fight crime is similar to a serial killer's need to act on
his fantasies), but Vaughn can't divest himself of the feeling that it
would be really awesome just the same. When Hit Girl ends up getting
beaten up in her climactic battle with D'Amico, you can feel the heartbreak
that her childhood's been stolen by this very adult business... and yet
just moments before, she was slitting people's throats to the tune of a
Joan Jett song. And you can just feel the production patting itself
on the back for the way such inabilities to reconcile its own contradictions
just make it all the cooler. Rent Fight Club if you want to
see this kind of thing done well, and in fact I'd have LOVED to see David
Fincher take on this material.
But as much as Kick-Ass
is a missed opportunity and is at times utterly irksome, it's also often
very, very good. I wouldn't have wanted to miss the stuff that works,
and I think most fans of the superhero genre will agree. I kinda
felt like I was having an abusive relationship with the film as it unfolded:
could anything so simple as a star rating summarize such an experience?
If so, I guess it's got to be three. |
