A DESENSITIZED MOVIE FOR A DESENSITIZED AUDIENCE: a review of "Kick-Ass"

"KICK-ASS" Co-Written and Directed by Matthew Vaughn
zero stars

Let me not waste your time with my assessment. "Kick-Ass," Director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of the graphic novel is, so far, the very worst film I have seen this year. There is not even one element that I can recommend as what began as an unfunny and complete tonal disaster descended into a level of repugnance from which it was unable to recover. I HATED this movie. It was a mean-spirited, ugly experience masquerading as hipster edginess and post-ironic cool. And after sitting through this terrible, ill conceived movie, which did receive its fair share of positive critical reviews and enough box office dollars to ensure the inevitable sequel, all I could do was wonder just what does it have to take to entertain an audience in the 21st century.

The plot of “Kick-Ass” is based in standard comic book lore and eventually spirals off into its own self-consciously quirky directions. Unnoticed, average teenager and comic book fan Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) nurses a secret desire to become a superhero and help others despite having no powers, no valid heroic abilities, or no technological gear and gadgets. Despite his lack of…everything…he sends away for a green costume, complete with mask, determined to live out his heroic fantasies. He creates a MySpace fan page for self-promotion and after successfully warding off three gang members, he becomes a media sensation which catches the eye of crime lord Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). Kick-Ass’ antics also alert real world vigilantes (and obvious nod to Batman and Robin) Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter, the foul mouthed, hot tempered, purple wigged and black masked Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), who themselves are engaged in a revenge plot against D’Amico.

This would all be well and good if the movie weren’t so riveted in its own self-congratulatory sense of post-ironic posing. “Kick-Ass” attempts to riff on comic books and comic book themed films but fails on every level, including its weak special effects and ultimate disregard for its own visual thematics as it forgets about its comic book panel effect as the film advances. Even beginning with the title, it all feels like nothing more than a pseudo-subversive stunt that never rises above the level of a sixth grade bathroom joke. It is not a parody or a satire as it is never truly clear on what it is parodying and satirizing. It has all of the notes but it never knows how to perform the music and make it sing. I’m no prude and believe me, it does indeed take quite a bit to actually offend me but I have to say that if forcefully delivered masturbation jokes, endless streams of profanity without any finesse or purpose and painfully unfunny streaks of homosexual mistaken identity, qualify for “edginess” then consider me a square for absolutely none of it worked. Tone is absolutely, positively, entirely EVERYTHING, especially in a movie that is trying to straddle the fences of extreme action and comedy and in all possible ways, Vaughn sloppily botched them all.

For the first two sections of the film, we are just given a mess of a movie where empty headed teenage hijinks merge uncomfortably with gangsters, thugs and “Goodfellas” level and styled violence. But mostly, there is the matter of a massive elephant in the room concerning Kick-Ass and Hit Girl. The two kids in question are unquestionably insane and the film never really deals with this element at all. Kick-Ass has misplaced delusions of grandeur in the fantasy world he desperately wants to live in, even after he is nearly killed during his debut act of vigilantism. His only thought after enduring a surgery that has given him metallic plates throughout his body is that he is now “just like Wolverine.”

Even worse, Hit Girl is an unrepentant, soulless, psychopathic killer, brainwashed and used by her nuthouse father Big Daddy in order to enact his own brand of revenge against the ones who once wronged him. Although Big Daddy’s former police partner Marcus (played by Omari Hardwick) quickly acknowledges that very elephant briefly, it is never, ever mentioned again. Vaughn just cannot decide just what exactly his movie wants or needs to be at its very core. He wants us to buy these kids as superheroes but I suppose he wants us to laugh at them as well. We are meant to believe these two kids are superheroes, but without giving any of his characters any stitch of humanity an audience can relate to, all you have are characters without conscience or an understanding about the consequences of their actions. As we all learned in Director Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” (2002), with great power comes great responsibility. But the characters don’t believe this tidbit of advice for a second, so why should we believe in them?

Where the film flies off of the rails is during the film’s extended action climax which finds Kick-Ass and Big Daddy being tortured on live television and the internet by D'Amico's henchmen, a showdown between Kick-Ass and the duplicitous Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and the unbelievably brutal warpath unleashed by Hit Girl. When “Kick-Ass” was released in theaters, there was minor controversy surrounding the utilization of young actress Chloe Grace Moretz so heavily in sequences where she is required to utter the most extreme profanities of all in addition to graphically eviscerating her enemies. As I watched Moretz slice, claw, pummel, and bludgeon henchmen after henchmen as if she were Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” series, I knew that while these sequences were designed to be enormous crowd pleasers, I just sat there feeling…well…unclean. All of the proceedings just felt so profoundly, tremendously, overwhelmingly wrong to me and by film’s end, I knew that what I saw wasn’t edgy, cool, groundbreaking or innovative. It was exploitation.

While I will forever hold up the medium of film as a valid art form and filmmakers as artists that should not compromise their visions to suit any one person’s tastes, I do also believe that filmmakers do have a certain responsibility when they are wielding that much artistic power. It’s a simple thought really. Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. Going back to the extremely violent revenge fantasy, western, samurai epic hybrid of “Kill Bill” for a moment, even Tarantino knew the meaning and power of restraint—case in point, the brutal animated sequence from “Kill Bill Vol. 1” (2003) which depicts the cycle of violence and horrific origin of O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu). The section depicts gangsters, pedophilia, the murder of parents as the child hides under the bed as well as the child’s incomprehensible terror and ultimate retribution. It was a sequence so harsh that Tarantino himself expressed in an interview that there was just no way he could place a living, breathing child in that situation. And that, dear readers, is the crux. All of the violence in “Kill Bill,” for instance, is committed by adults. It is an adult movie for adults that actually delivers the dangers and psychological downfall of revenge and violence amidst its pulpy fabrics and colorful characters. The violence of “Kick-Ass,” on the other hand, is committed by and enacted towards children and no matter how much Vaughn and his filmmakers rationalize their movie, these characters are still children!

How could Vaughan, his filmmaking crew, the movie studio that financed this piece of garbage and I suppose worst of all, the parents of Chloe Grace Moretz, allow her participation in this verbal and visual carnage? The very first image of Moretz in this film is when she is glibly taking a bullet in the chest, at point blank range by her own Father! Late in the film, as I watched this child, holding two guns, racing down a hallway like Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix” (1999), blowing away every single gangster goon in her path, complete with gushing amounts of gore, I was not excited. I was disgusted. When she is subsequently beaten within an inch of her life by Frank D’Amico, I was not pinned to the edge of my seat in exhilaration, I was horrified. When D'Amico then aims a gun at her head, ready to place a bullet into her brain, all I could do was wonder just what does it have to take to be entertained these days? Here is the image of a grown man, thrashing around a child, an 11 year old girl for God’s sakes, and this is supposed to constitute a night out at the movies?!?! I don’t care if she is supposed to be a superhero with explosive combat skills. Hit Girl IS A CHILD and there’s no getting around that. Perhaps this level of battle worked in the original graphic novel but when visually represented with flesh and blood actors, the effect is supremely distasteful, disgusting and all parties involved should be ashamed of themselves.

What is happening to us, dear readers? Have we really become this desensitized? Has the sight of an 11 year old girl spewing all manner of vulgarities, killing everyone in her rampaging path and being battered around by an adult male become an acceptable form of entertainment? If Matthew Vaughn and the movie studio proclaim that they are just giving us what we, the public, want to see, then what does that say about us? I truly hope that a film like this is anomaly and not the newfound normalcy.

Chloe Grace Moretz is a talented young actress who, in addition to this movie, appeared recently in 2009's “(500) Days Of Summer.” She reminds me greatly of a young Jodie Foster or Tatum O’Neal and I do think that if she plays her cards right, she could have a strong future in the movies and I will be very glad to see her again. But, she needs to surround herself with the right people to assist with her decision making so that she may avoid be exploited in this manner again. But, when there money to be made, especially when there’s a sequel in the pipeline, it seems that credibility, morality and humanity is lost.

I have often spoken about humanity here on Savage Cinema and I believe that movies, at their very best, and no matter what the genre, can be some of the most powerful explorations of what it means to be human. At its worst, we receive films like "Kick-Ass," a film that nihilistically revels in its own inhumanity. When a mainstream film of this sort arrives, we, as consumers and movie goers have a choice to make and I just feel that when it comes down to the sight of a bloody 11 year old girl staring down the barrel of a gun, we can all make the right choice.

Our humanity depends upon it.