Summary: Dave Lizewski decides to try being a superhero, calling himself Kick-Ass. Unfortunately he has no powers or skills and ends up pissing off a local crime-boss. He teams up with 11 year-old Hit Girl and her father, Big Daddy. Some serious shit goes down.
I really have to learn to stop doing this to myself. If you are a geek you have probably been hearing about Kick-Ass for a while now. It was damn near impossible to avoid it if you frequent any movie/geek themed websites and they have been building the hype for months. People saw it at Comic Con and raved. “It’s so vulgar and violent” they’d say, “People won’t know what hit them”. And then the trailers came out. And damn did they ever look good. And then the Red-Band trailers. Holy Crap! The movie looked even better! Is that an 11 year-old girl calling people cunts and making some guy blow his own head off by spearing him in the hand with some rope-dart thingy and wrapping it around his head?! You’d better believe it is! So, needless to say, I got excited. I had all these expectations for a sweet looking ultraviolent movie that was going to knock my socks off. I got in line early on opening night (after having some wisdom teeth pulled – yeah I’m hardcore. I couldn’t even eat popcorn or use a straw) and waited with baited breath for the movie to begin. And it was good. But that’s it.
I think what I was most disappointed by was the violence. Before I continue, let me make it clear that this is an exceedingly violent movie – I’m guessing Johnny-on-the-street probably hasn’t seen many movies that are so gleefully violent. But that said, I was still underwhelmed. Maybe Roz and I have just done too much damage to our brains by subjecting them to things like Tokyo Gore Police, but I don’t think that is all it is. I think Kill Bill Vol. 1 was way more over-the-top violent and gory and that was seen by many people. Even Watchmen was more violent. Perhaps not as many people died (the body count in Kick-Ass is definitely respectable, even if its showpiece is no Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves), but Watchmen slowed down the violence and lingered on it. Someone’s arm breaks in slow motion, bones popping through the skin; someone is blown apart and part of their skeleton is hanging from the ceiling; a silhouetted Rorschach goes to town on someone’s skull with a cleaver. But the pacing of the fights in Kick-Ass is so fast that there is no time for anything like that. Overall, this makes for some pretty sweet, fast-paced awesomeness, but often it feels like it is over too soon and you didn’t really see anything. But that’s just me (and Roz). I’m sure most people will be suitably impressed by the violence in Kick-Ass.So you are probably thinking to yourself that that is not much of a flaw (some of you may think it is a strength), but that is by no means the only problem I have with Kick-Ass. However, first I’d like to tell you what was awesome, because this movie really is a whole lot of cinematic good times. I was very impressed by the acting of everyone involved, although Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass and Hit Girl, respectively) particularly stand out. Even Nicolas Cage is quite good as Big Daddy. The comedic timing of the friends was excellent, which is very important because this movie had a lot more comedy than I expected. And overall, the pacing was great, with the story zipping along and never giving you the chance to get bored.
However, I was surprised at the lack of style in the movie. Many people have lamented the dominance of style over substance and directors like Zach Snyder, and even Quentin Tarantino, have been strongly criticized for this. But the fact remains that a precedent has been set for this type of movie and it extends much farther back in cinema history than old Q.T. The most egregious example of the disappointing style in Kick-Ass is in the music. Nobody can deny the importance of music in film, but I think in these sorts of violent, but not gritty, movies music plays an especially big role. Think back on old mainstream movies that were considered very violent in their time. Things like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or A Clockwork Orange (you don’t need to go much farther back than that, I’m not going to talk about any pre-Hays Code stuff, because I don’t know anything about it). Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick were both masters at the art of putting music to film and this tradition has continued with directors like Tarantino and Snyder.
Think of your favourite scenes from almost any of their movies and you can be sure that the music will play an integral part of that memory. The violence in these movies is approached almost like a ballet and so the music is always well thought out and the scenes are planned around it. Tarantino goes so far as to actually choose the music while he is first writing the screenplay, if not beforehand. So this has trained us to have certain expectations. Unfortunately the music in Kick-Ass feels almost like an afterthought and seems to start and end jarringly in scenes. I also found that they kept using the same music as the trailer and it kind of pulled me out of the movie. I’m not going to describe anything in detail because that would involve spoilers, but it is something that both Roz and I commented on when the credits stopped rolling.On the whole, Kick-Ass is tons of fun. It does a great job at playing around with the tropes of superhero/comic book movies, positing what it would actually be like for someone to decide to put on a costume and fight crime (either they’d get fucked up or they’d be psychos). I say that Kick-Ass is well worth your time and encourage you to head out to your local Cineplex and have a grand time.
B
originally posted Apr. 20, 2010
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