Title: Kick-Ass
Rating: R
Release date: April 16, 2010
Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes (117 minutes)
Directed by: Matthew Vaughn
Written by: Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Aaron Johnson (as Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass), Chloe Moretz (as Mindy Macready/Hit-Girl), Nicholas Cage (as Damon Macready/Big Daddy), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (as Chris D’Amico/Red Mist), Mark Strong (as Frank D’Amico)
Genre: action, comedy, superhero
Check out the Wikipedia article for a plot summary.
Check out the IMDB page for more information.
Kick-Ass certainly does kick-ass, but there are a couple of things that surprised me about the movie and I’m not entirely sure I liked.
First is how quickly it skewed away from being “realistic.” Now, I wasn’t expecting it to be really down to earth in the slightest, so the way the movie began threw me off a bit. Some kid wants to be a superhero, his costume’s a stupid wetsuit, he sets up a website for heroism requests, and his first time out he gets his ass kicked. Perfectly reasonable. The way Kick-Ass operated was like if I briefly went insane and decided vigilantism was a sensible pastime—anyone could do it. But as soon as Nicholas Cage and his crazy daughter are introduced (and the very super-villainish bad guy, for that matter), I kind of wondered, why go for that semi-realism tone at all if you’re only going to do it for one character? Granted, it was awesome in any case, but it still made me tilt my head a bit.
More importantly than the on the fence, off the fence realism is the blatant disregard for human life. From Hit Girl and Big Daddy, it was hardly surprising (they’re pretty much sociopaths). But the way Kick-Ass doesn’t seem to mind blowing away a few guys at the end bugged me. There are several rules that superheroes generally follow that, as a comic book geek, Kick-Ass would have known. Number one on that list of rules is no killing. Unless you’re the freakin’ Punisher, killing anyone is a big no-no in the world of costume crime fighting. Since Kick-Ass is supposed to take place in somewhere like the real world and nobody has powers, it does make sense that Kick-Ass would have had to kill somebody eventually, if only in self defense. But when he does do it at the climax, he doesn’t have a single qualm about it. The character uses exclusively nonlethal weapons and freaks out when he sees bodies earlier in the movie, so I find it odd that he doesn’t bring up any issues with killing at all (especially when there’s a ten-year-old girl doing it). I was waiting for the talk when he first met Hit Girl and Big Daddy, but it didn’t happen and I assumed it’d be brought up later. No such luck. Considering how many Batman and Spider-Man references they make in this movie, two characters who are pretty infamous in their no-kill policy, it’s somewhat disappointing that it’s never even mentioned. This is a regular teenage boy who is also a comic book geek! It would have crossed his mind at least once.
Otherwise, I liked it. I was on the fence for a while with how much I liked Hit Girl (she almost seemed a little too unbelievable), but eventually decided her sheer awesomeness more than made up for the improbability of her existence. I heard a sequel’s in the works and I must say I’m looking forward to it.
P.S. Is it wrong that it took me until seeing him in a movie called Kick-Ass for me to think of Nick Cage as anything but a hack? I love you Nick, I swear.
P.S.S. Isn’t Kick-Ass published by Marvel? They said Batman like ten times in this movie, more than the even mentioned Spider-Man!
P.S.S.S. Actually Dave, Spider-Man doesn’t get all the girls; Peter Parker does. Then they find out that he’s Spider-Man and get kinda pissed about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment