Review by Barnaby Walter
Since its release, critics left (The Guardian), right (The Times) and centre (Empire) have been praising Kick-Ass as if it’s the most exciting thing since sliced bread. It’s been branded as a “taboo-breaking” comedy, and many of its fans have congratulated it for going where other movies have dared not gone. I know I am in a minority when I say that Kick-Ass is one of the worst movies released since the start of the year, and that many of you will be thinking I’ve taken leave of my senses as I tear it to pieces over the forthcoming paragraphs. But I found it a truly repulsive experience – an extended advert for vicious violence, illegal weaponry and child abuse.
In January I was less than enthusiastic about Avatar, an action movie that assumed its audience was made up of easily-bought mugs. Avatar conned the world into thinking it was worth more than what it was – a lazy, unoriginal, hypocritical action-fest. But while sitting through Kick-Ass, I find myself almost wishing I could meet those ridiculous blue men once more. Avatar wasn’t a good film, but its heart was in the right place (narratively speaking), and had a kind of conventional charm. Like McDonalds food – rubbish but welcoming. It was, for the most part, harmless. Something Kick-Ass is certainly not.
It is also boring. Clocking in at 1 hour 57 minutes, Kick-Ass doesn’t attempt to murder its audience in the same lengthy way Avatar did, but it has a jolly good try. With about five different endings stitched together, it doesn’t know what it wants its final message to be. And there are a lot of messages in this movie – most of them bad, cynical and abhorrent.
With its advertising clearly focused on a teenage audience, this pernicious beast of a film plays with the premise “what if ordinary people tried to be superheroes”. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an ordinary teenage boy. Ordinary in the sense that he doesn’t have superpowers. At school he is invisible to girls, and at home he reads comic books and masturbates frequently. For some weird reason, the film seems quite interested in Dave’s masturbatory habits, as if the time we see him jerking off will somehow fill the empty hole where most other writers give their characters depth and background. The only background we get on Dave is that his mum died suddenly at the kitchen table. The image of a mother dying in front of her son is presented as a funny moment at the start of the movie. It isn’t funny, but gives a glimpse of what misjudged humour there is to follow.
Dave decides to become the world’s first “real” superhero – a real person, fighting real crime with no special powers whatsoever. Oh, and he calls himself Kick-Ass. So, of course, he gets beaten up by the first villains he encounters. These are two low-life muggers who kick and punch him while laughing at his awful green suit. This comically violent scene suddenly veers off in far more serious direction when they produce a knife and attack him with it, stabbing him in the stomach. This turns the scene into a very uneasy mixture of comedy and shocking violence – slapstick meets knife crime in a few ill-judged minutes. When he is mended by a team of doctors, who build metal plates into his broken bones, his pain threshold becomes very strong due to messed-up nerve endings. Embarrassed by his green suit, Dave convinces the paramedics to say he was found naked and hides his outfit from his father and friends. For some unexplained reason, the fact he was allegedly found naked is enough for his school mates to decide he is gay. Although this brings homosexuality into the story in a rather ludicrous way, it allows Dave to make friends with the girl he loves, who up to this point has never registered his existence. She wants a gay-best-friend, so Dave isn’t too quick to dispel the rumours about his sexuality. In fact, he takes the chance and runs with it, becoming infinitely more popular than before with the opposite sex. Although an unlikely film to discourage homophobia in schools, one of the only virtues Kick-Ass has is that it presents homosexuality within a school positively rather than negatively. Aside from this well-handled subplot, the rest of the film attempts to appeal to the very worst type of people – those who find knives cool, using them even cooler and are amused by an 11-year old saying the C word.
Yes, the movie does feature a minor using filthy language; something that has attracted mostly positive attention from many respected publications. It’s as if this is something brilliant, cool, and out-there. It isn’t. It’s just a desperate attempt to shock and get laughs. It highlights Kick-Ass’s pathetic need to snatch humour from places that have previously been considered out of bounds because, without shock-value, the whole movie is actually a rather dull experience. Where some writers use wit, charm and intelligent expression to raise laughs, this film nose-dives straight for the gutter. The swearing child is Hit-Girl – a girl who has been raised to fight bad men by her deluded father, Big Daddy (a wasted Nicholas Cage). We are first introduced to the two when her father shoots her in the chest. She’s wearing a bullet-proof vest under her little-girl-pink coat, but it still makes for grisly viewing. This little scene in fact sums up the whole film’s obnoxious nature; as if showing atrocious violence towards children is in some way a newly discovered form of edgy entertainment. Sadism has always been prevalent in violent films, but never before has it been channelled in such a distasteful and mainstream way, encouraging its audience to find enjoyment in witnessing the unforgivable.
Hit-Girl is undeniably the most entertaining character in the movie, played very well by Chloe Moretz. She comes to the aid of Dave when he gets himself in some sticky patches, and proves very effective in a fight. But there’s something about her that reminded me strongly of Chucky from Child’s Play, and she slaughters her opponents in a hideously brutal and gory way. It’s disturbing that Hit-Girl is presented as the cool alternative to Dave’s uncool-ness, and the fact that she appears to enjoy the violence she doles out is seemingly a plus factor makes her a very irresponsible creation. I don’t like to be the one taking the moral high-ground on what will probably be one of the year’s most celebrated characters in one of the most watched movies of 2010, but it seems immoral not to question the way she is presented to a young audience. She seems to be very sexually aware (which is creepy, rather than funny) and is even shown to be an object of lustful desire to one teenage character just after she has demonstrated her skill at wounding and murdering.
Kick-Ass delights in making the most shocking things fun, sexually provocative and very accessible. With a 15 certificate, many young viewers will be able to “enjoy” the ghastly violence and sickening glorification of weapons (including some lethal gadgets that many will never have heard of but will undoubtedly be Googling when they get home). There is a scene at the end of the film where the aforementioned little girl gets her head repeatedly kicked and punched by the movie’s big villain (played with gusto by Mark Strong). This was the moment I realised the movie was a truly disgusting piece of work, and the more I thought about writer Jane Goldman and writer/director Matthew Vaughn discussing how many times they can get away with the 11-year old getting ferociously punched, the more my hate for it increased. Don’t be deceived by the colourful advertising campaign or some critics’ claim that the nastiness is “guilt free”. They day the majority regard this as a guiltless pleasure is will be a very sad day for cinema, but good for the pockets of Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn and producer Brad Pitt.
2010 | USA / UK | Mathew Vaughn
Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, from a comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.
Production Companies: Marv Films, Plan B
Distributor: Universal Pictures International (UK)
BBFC Certificate: 15 (Contains strong language, once very strong, & strong bloody comic violence).
Your review was as funny as it was horrible.