Kick-Ass: the review

A few months ago I saw the Kick-Ass trailer and I thought, “Wow, that looks pretty cool.” I didn’t know it was based on a comic. (Although that should have been obvious.) In the last few weeks, several of the blogs/tweeters/sites I follow either highly anticipated this movie or had already seen it and loved it.

The first review I read of it, however, was Roger Ebert’s, and he loathes this movie:

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

Do you know what you have to do to get Roger Ebert to loathe your movie? Wow, I thought.

(Btw, if you haven’t been reading Roger Ebert’s personal blog, do yourself a favor and hie there now. He really is one of the best writers going at the moment—he was a great writer before his illness, and now he has just brought it to a whole new level. Whether you agree with him or not, you always know where he stands, and if you’re going to disagree with him, bring your A game.)

Then we got Entertainment Weekly, where our favorite movie critic, Owen Gleiberman, gave Kick-Ass a B+:

Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake), is an enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described — in spirit, at least — as reality-based. When Dave, in costume, gets out into the world of grungy criminals, he discovers that putting a stop to evil is no picnic. A showdown with parking-lot thieves puts him in the hospital, and the fact that he bleeds real blood is part of what hooks you; the movie never makes it too easy for him. But it doesn’t mock him, either. Standing there in his silly/noble outfit, brandishing a pair of ninja batons, he looks just crazy enough to be a little scary, and when he chases off a pack of muggers and the exploit gets caught on video, it becomes a Web sensation. The legend of Kick-Ass is born.

We love Gleiberman so much that anything he gives over a C is an auto-see for us, so clearly we had to go see this one. I mentioned to Darin that Ebert was diametrically opposed to Gleiberman on this one and Darin said, “Ebert is the better writer, Gleiberman is the better reviewer.”

Well, you’ve probably guessed by now, but when we walked out of the theater we were each pretty much convinced one of those critics was right: Me, Ebert; Darin, Gleiberman.

Kick-Ass is the story of a 17-year-old comic book geek who decides he wants to be a superhero. So he buys a costume via mail order, throws a few punches at a mirror, and then goes out into the mean streets…where he promptly gets his ass kicked, hard. He gets a few mini-powers as a result (the ability to withstand pain, because his nerve endings are messed up…but, uh, you know that the body still suffers the injury, right? The writers conveniently skip over that fact in subsequent scenes), and continues to go out, where he becomes an Internet sensation.

Once the movie has set up that superheroes don’t exist in the real world, it throws into this mix a dad who’s training his daughter to be a superhero! And heck if it doesn’t seem like she has some serious superpowers. She bounds! She can throw a punch! She has the most amazing ability to aim, shoot, and absorb recoil from a gun ever! The actress who plays Hit Girl is fabulous young actress named Chloë Grace Moretz—I think we’re going to see a lot out of her. There is nothing Hit Girl can’t do.

You then have uber-powerful bad guys (the Mafia, natch), and shit happens. Really violent shit. Really violent over-the-top Diane-has-her-hands-over-her-eyes-for-minutes shit.

Where I’m coming from when I tell you my reaction: I saw Kill Bill and I loved it. I saw Inglourious Basterds and I loved it (even if I did close my eyes for the head-bashing scene). If given a choice between a rom-com and an action movie, Darin doesn’t even bother mentioning both movies because he knows which one I’m going to pick. I write action and violence. My reaction to this movie is not about violence. It’s about what the hell the filmmaker was going for.

If we’re in the real world (ie, all of Act I), then Hit Girl really is killing all of those guys and psychopathically walking away with nary a blink. If this isn’t the real world, then what the hell is the point of this movie? Kick-Ass changes the rules on us mid-stream, and it leaves me waving a flag saying, “WTF?”

This movie wants it both ways: it wants us to think violence is real and does some actual damage, and it wants us to think it’s cool.

When the hero dispatches the bad guy with a bazooka and uses a goddamn cheesy Eighties-style sendoff line first, the movie wants us to think that’s cool. When the hero gets some serious fucking damage done to him in an extended torture scene and then walks away with nary a stutter in his step, the movie wants us to think that’s cool. I don’t care if his nerve endings are shot and he has metal replacements in his body; if he’s supposed to have his internal organs rearranged, he’s going to be puking up blood, not wondering how to help Hit Girl kill some people. And when we see Hit Girl moving through a warehouse with night-vision goggles picking off big scary men first-person-shooter style, we’re supposed to think that’s cool.

And then there’s simply what we see on screen, which is often an 11-year-old girl blowing guys’s heads off with a gun as big as she is, or conversely getting her scrawny butt kicked. You can’t watch that and say, Well, it’s just a comic book. My eyes are watching it happening.

My biggest question when leaving the movie theater was, Did director Matthew Vaughn call up Mark Strong (the actor who plays the big bad guy) and say, “I have a script here. The climax is you beating the shit out of an 11-year-old girl,” and did Strong immediately respond, “Okay, I’m in”?

And then, of course, there’s the standard (and yet: still necessary) complaint, which is, “Jesus H Christ, am I tired of the portrayal of women in these things.” You have your dead/comatose women (the moms (of course!) of Kick-Ass, Hit Girl, and another superhero, Red Mist), and you have your fucktoys (the English teacher, the hooker in the apartment, and the girlfriend). That’s it. That’s what women get to be.

Oh, and then there’s Hit Girl, but since she’s 11 or 12, I’ll cut her some slack. She has about 6 years before she’ll be someone’s fucktoy.

The guy who posted he wishes he could take his daughter to this movie, but she’s too young? Dude, you have some serious rethinking to do.

Anyhow. I’m clearly not a fan of this movie. I understand why Darin likes it—he doesn’t flinch at movie violence the way I do, where I seem to experience every punch in real time—but I am not feeling the love at all.