Review: Kick-Ass the Movie

[dvandom]

This was originally going to be part of this week's Capsules, but it just kept getting longer as I found more things to say, and spoilers crept in, and...well, it's been a while since I posted a full Rant anyway. :)

Short form: I liked it, but saw it as a variation on the theme of the Hong Kong revenge actioner. If loads of (admittedly balletic) violence and/or cussing put you off, you should probably give this one a pass.

      Kick-Ass: MARV/Lionsgate - I have never read the comic this is based on,
and generally avoid Mark Millar projects ever since Ultimates #6.  However,
this is one of those times when I was kinda counting on the inevitable
Hollywood rewrites and test audience watering down to get around Millar's
flaws (including "everyone is a total jerk al the time" as a substitute for
characterization).  In the chatter I've read about this movie, I have yet to
see someone say they loved the comic and disliked the movie, though,
suggesting that they may have kept the good Millar stuff (hey, I don't think
he's 100% bad, just more bad than good) and ditched the bad Millar stuff.

     This is a 1980s Hong Kong revenge actioner into which stumbles a kid who
decides to be a superhero.  The action plot (as opposed to the coming of age
plot surrounding the title character) is straight out of HK actioners, but
with a superhero overlay (the movie's not too clear, but it looks like Big
Daddy may have been at least a little Batman-ish before Kick-Ass debuted, and
just cranked up the comicbook elements later).  If saying "Hong Kong
actioner" doesn't make it clear enough, there is a LOT of violence.
Sometimes beautifully choreographed ballets of bullets, but it's still very
violent and rather bloody, albeit not in a Shaw Brothers sort of arterial
spray way.  The people involved in directing and shooting Kick-Ass definitely
grok the genre, though, and the fight scenes are like distilled John Woo
(among other directors, but I figure most of the people reading this will
have heard of Woo).  There's also a lot of cussin', but no more than you can
hear in the hallways of the average high school (which is to say a ****-load
of it), and some breast-objectification, but frankly if you can handle the
violence you probably won't find the other stuff bothersome.  While I can't
say for sure having never read the comic, based on such Millar as I have read
I bet a lot of the more jarringly gratuitous sexual content is where the
screenwriters were being faithful to the source material.

     Since it's all the news can talk about, I'll now address the matter of
Hit Girl.  There's really only one brief scene in which she could be
considered to be sexualized, and even then everyone in the scene recognizes
that she's too young ("I can WAIT.  I vow I will save myself for her."
"Shouldn't be too difficult.").  Her red carpet appearances push that
particular envelope a lot farther than the movie ever does.  More ethically
troublesome is how she's basically been turned into an 11-year-old living
weapon by her obsessed father.  She's like Cassandra Kane, but instead of her
vocabulary being replaced by fighting moves it's replaced by cussin'.  And
she's 11.  Again, though, if you don't mind seeing guys get shot in the face
repeatedly, you can probably contain your outrage...plus it's not like her
storyline is totally a moral vacuum.  It just starts that way.

     In terms of general storytelling, the movie is...well, if you go in
expecting 1980s HK actioner you won't find the storytelling disappointing.
The foreshadowing is so heavy they might as well just show us a flashforward
of the relevant scenes, the characters tend to be genre savvy to the point
where you suspect the writers are addicted to TVTropes.com, and the love
interest is less believable than the fact the title character survives his
first fight.  But it's worth putting up with for the action sequences, which
had the audience at my showing oohing and aahing.

     Does the movie have a Message?  Well, it does try to have one about the
nature of heroism and how people need to try to make a difference (made very
tellingly in the case of one minor character who pulled a "I see nothing"
early in the movie and then got gunned down when he tried that a second
time).  But the main message is that ultraviolence is hellacool...as long as
it's happening to someone else.  If you have something worth living for, you
might want to think twice before going all the way to the extreme of putting
on a costume and fighting crime.  Turning a blind eye is bad, jumping in feet
first is suicidal, find a middle ground.  And then watch the pretty
explosions from the safety of that middle ground.

     I've read that Millar originally planned to have the story be just about
Big Daddy and Hit Girl, but while I can't speak to the execution in the
comic, the decision to bring in Kick-Ass himself definitely changed the tone
of the ending of the movie.  Rather than being about just the private revenge
story, it became about the beginning of a movement.  Kick-Ass was just some
schmuck with a costume, but his involvement in things brought it to the
public eye.  He's not just the viewpoint through which the reader/viewer sees
the revenge tale, he's the window of his world onto things.  So, for all the
nihilism and darkness of the core revenge tale, there's a more hopeful ending
overall because some nerd in a wetsuit decided to go after muggers with a
stick.  In a standard HK revenger, the fall of the villain at the end has no
real effect on the otherwise corrupt world, so it's all rather pointless.
But by tying it to the weird bildungsroman of Kick-Ass himself, it may have
made an impact on society.  The movie's fairly vague on that point, though,
and we only have Kick-Ass's voiceover to go by.

     All in all, I'd recommend this to fans of HK actioners.  Not so much to
fans of superheroes or comics if they aren't also into the Category III sort
of actioner.  But even though I had to drive 20 miles away to see it (the
local theater didn't have it), I felt like my time and money were well
spent.  As an interesting aside, the employees of that theater (a little 4
screen place I've only seen movies at two or three times before) were dressed
up as home-made superheroes.  They clearly knew where most of their business
this week would be coming from....

   Dave Van Domelen, wonders if the local theater will look at ticket sales from Junction City and decide to make room for it this week.

Comments

[gary-williams.livejournal.com]

I actually saw this Saturday night, the first film I've gone to see since Star Trek.

Hit Girl was awesome. I would've enjoyed the film more if it focused on Hit Girl and Big Daddy and omitted Kick-Ass completely. There was no need for them to ever contact Kick-Ass in the first place (aside from warning him about leaving evidence behind).