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Movie Review: Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)

Published Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:01:17 -0600

Last updated Sun, 20 Mar 2022 13:01:47 -0500

The publicity for Kick-Ass will tell you, very clearly, that this is a realistic superhero film. That it looks at what happens if an ordinary non-powered person dressed up in tights and a ski mask and tries to fight crime. And that in doing so, it's very different to any superhero film before it.

And that's balls.

Kick-Ass, based on the finally-concluded comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr, published by Marvel Comics, is as much a cartoony, fantasy concoction as Spider-Man, Batman or Iron Man. It just keeps it in different places. It not just knows its nature, it embraces it and it goes out of its way to show it too. And thank goodness for it. Nothing would be less welcome than Ken Loach's Superman. This is a film about comics, superheroes and superheroes films, yes, and it needs just as much suspension of disbelief as it takes to enjoy them.

And if you're the kind of person who has a problem when marketing and reality grate, well, you'll stay a lot longer for Kick-Ass than you would have done for Inglourious Basterds. Because this film wants you to have a good time. A really good time. To feel, to connect, to laugh, to laugh along, to cheer.

We follow the young Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), stuck in the rut of nondescript life as he takes his geekery to the next level and becomes his own fantasy, a superhero. And brings on a whole world of pain as the people he takes on move from stray cats to hoodlums to organised crimes. I've seen this movie twice, an incomplete cut back in January and a final version three weeks ago. And both times the audience I saw it with let their good feeling be known. If you don't fun watching this, well then you don't have the ability to lose yourself in a movie and go with a narrative flow. You probably took a synopsis of Pocahontas into the cinema to see Avatar so that you could tick boxes. The Banana Splits song used in the fight scene starring Hit Girl (Chlow Moretz), a twelve year old master assassin mentored by her father the Batman-looking Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), demonstrates this perfectly. She performs these impossible action-star moves, a twelve year old girl cutting grown men in twain with a sword held in one hand, attacking, leaping, dodging and basically kicking the shit out of a roomful of adults, we enter her head with the music, which is suddenly equally impossible – and the whole begins to make some kind of internal sense. This is her reality, she sees everything as a game. Why not have such an upbeat silly inappropriate theme tune going on? We can also look at Hit-Girl's big rescue scene of Kick-Ass and Big Daddy (And damn isn't that a change from the gender norm). We're suddenly in Quake territory here, as the film switches to first person perspective. Because, once again, we're in Hit Girl's head and she really does see the world in a different way. Life's a game and she's already read the walkthrough on GameFAQ.

And despite the title of the movie, it's Hit Girl who takes this movie. And her father, Big Daddy plays along. In the suit, he's suddenly channelling Adam West, he's playing along too as he creates this fantasy world for his daughter. And it's odd that it takes the film's most controversial moment to illustrate that. Young children swearing. It's big and it's clever. And Hit-Girl uses the word "cunt" in its British rather than American form – an extreme form of bastard or wanker used towards men, rather that the misogynist form used mostly against a woman. It's that moment that cemented in my mind the foul mouthed difference between Hit Girl and her traditionally straight laced father who finds it hard to use any expletive. He's just let her see so many movies, no matter how inappropriate. And she probably watched Twin Town or Shaun Of The Dead along the way. No wonder Kick Ass pales against these two more colourful characters.

Equally Mark Strong pulls in his thoughtful bad guy routine, honed and mastered from Our Friends In The North, through Stardust and Sherlock Holmes, and in readiness for Green Lantern to come. Stardust fellows Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemyng both from Stardust also do wonderfully convincing cameoes. Fletcher's American accent has come on a long way since Press Gang, and Jason Flemyng delivering an shitscared oral sex look to camera is priceless. Dexter Fletcher's car that gets crushed is the same car the actor drove in Vaughan's film Layer Cake – and the characters are pretty similar too. Is Vaughn suggesting they take place in the same continuity? That would make for even more geekiness, so probably.

What did surprise me was just how funny this movie is. It's funnier than the comic. Vaughan and Goldman's last film, Stardust, was sweet, wry and whimsically amusing. Kick Ass is proper funny. Even the bit with the microwave. Scenes in the comic which were just throwaway, like Dave's fantasies about his teacher, are played out for laughs and it works. The even weaker Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), whose superpower is that he's got a cool car has one of the funniest scene in the movie, just from a pratfall.

And an old rule in film is revamped, "Chekov's gun", which reads "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." In Kick-Ass there's a bazooka on the wall in Big Daddy's apartment, and a big mystery in the box. And the moment Kick-Ass arrives towards the end of the final act, the audience should cheer with laughter. Will you? If you have a soul, yes. Because this is a film about a young nobody boy who seizes the day, only for the day to seize him and kick the fuck out of him. It's about persistence in the face of unavoidable failure because you might as well, what else is there to do in life. And it's about superheroes and superhero films. Kick-Ass is a very empty film. There are no life lessons per se, it doesn't illuminate an undisclosed aspect of the world and its people, it had hardly anything to say about the human condition aside from "go on, give it a try, you might be hit by a bastard tomorrow".

And even when it looks at the humdrum details of real teenage life, away from the glamour fantasies, it comes nowhere close to what The Inbetweeners achieved. Kick Ass is what it is – entertaining, joyful and most definitely quotable but it's an example of fluff over substance with hard edges super glued on. What's even more surprising, given all that, is how effective a narrative it is. And it's jam packed with geekery and references throughout. Whether that's in-depth superhero discussion from the main characters, a comic shop full of the world that informs this very comic or Matthew Vaughn's wife Claudia Schiffer makes an appearance advertising her own perfume on a billboard ad that takes over the whole screen (as Big Daddy and Kick Ass appear as two small characters on either side of it), it creates a mileau that pulls the knowing, nodding viewing along without forcing out of the movie experience.

Okay, the Scott Pilgrim reference sticks out a bit but hey, if it helps that movie too, why not…

As for its similarity to the now-finished comic, well it's down pat, not only in plot and character, but also in tone and approach. However the only let down for me comparing the two is that the comic has bleaker twists throughout and a more satisfying conclusion as a result. However, that's probably cheating as Mark Millar wrote the end after he's seen the screenplay – and changed his final scene, twisting it further it seems in an attempt to outdo the film. Which, for those final scenes at least, he did. Also the comic has more references to testicles, which is always a good thing.

So in the comic, Dave Lizewski's personal ending is that of continued failure, but with the memory of what once was. The film has to be more literal with its success, it seems, the comic can be more tangential.

Also, no film maker can make anyone look quite as beat up as the simple pen of John Romita Jr. We never see the held-together-by-bandages Kick-Ass from the comic and no blow lands quite as well, no flesh ripples with the blow, no bones quite dislocate along the motion lines left with one swing of a Romita punch. Which makes the Romita-created animation section of the movie a real treat, as well as the gangster illustrations covering Big Daddy's walls. Like I said, there's a lot to enjoy in this film.

Certain aspects of the structure start to creak a little on second viewings, but the laughs definitely hold up.

For real.

Kick Ass is released in the UK on March 26th and in the USA on the 16th April.

Kick-Ass

Review by Rich Johnston

7/10

The publicity for Kick-Ass will tell you, very clearly, that this is a realistic superhero film. That it looks at what happens if an ordinary non-powered person dressed up in tights and a ski mask and tries to fight crime. And that in doing so, it's very different to any superhero film before it. And […]

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