My Take On... "Kick-Ass"

My Take On… “Kick-Ass”

Matthew Vaughn’s “Kick Ass” may be the most infuriating movie I have seen in a long time, but that’s probably just because it spends the first fifteen minutes pretending it’s going to have something interesting to say. The film, sold on the premise of “what if super heroes existed in the real world?” (you know, the premise of every other comic book movie ever made) starts as a combination of genre commentary and “American Pie” style humor (people still laugh at jokes about large African nipples and jerking off in 2010? Really?), then slowly but surely devolves into a sophomoric, emotionless attempt at an action film.

The film, following four eccentric superheroes (the plucked-from-Superbad Kick-Ass, complete with awkward locker encounters, Nic Cage as Adam West, Chloe Mortez as his gun wielding butterfly knife flicking daughter, and McLovin’ as the villain), never finds the right tone. Displaying funny over the top violence that is no way realistic (at one point, an 11-year old Travis Bickle’s a group of mobsters, gunning down each and every one while proceeding down a hallway, then throws TWO handgun clips in the air for no reason, catching them in place IN THE HANDGUNS. I wouldn’t buy that move pulled off by Chow Yun-Fat) with naturalistic touches like close-ups on exit wounds with heavy, realistically presented bloodletting.

Vaughn essentially invites you to revel in the violence his film seems to be satirizing. In only one scene does Vaughn hit what he aims for, where Nic Cage (as excellently expressionist as always, between this and last year’s hilarious “Bad Lieutenant” he’s hopefully en route to a comeback) shoots his bulletproof vested daughter, to give her a “feel” for things. The lack of serious injury or dramatized danger gives it the whimsical, funny, and genre-conscious feel the movie never reaches again; the big problem is that the scene occurs only ten minutes in.

And therein lays the biggest problem (of many) with ‘Kick Ass’. The film becomes so lost in appreciating itself and presenting mindless visceral visuals, that it never bothers to make any sense or any kind of point. At one minute, it’s satirizing comics. Then it’s a gross out comedy. Then it’s a over-the-top video game style action sequence. The female lead, Kick Ass’ Girlfriend, is used solely as a dramatic tool, completely empty and unbelievable with her character only existing (literally) so there’s someone to kiss him at the end while he celebrates his victory. It is what it wants to be with no flow whatsoever, and thus falls into a middle ground of tone that is a death sentence for this type of film. While the film wants you to believe (and still, this is only held up in the first act) it’s making fun of comic conventions, more than anything the creators just want to take a guy looking like Batman stabbing people and firing off large shotguns, and put him on the big screen.

In ‘Kill Bill’, Tarantino ratcheted up every level on every meter, pumping you with limitless genre clichés, unending unrealistic samurai blood, massive fight sequences that grow in scope as the film progresses, etc. John Woo’s Asian cinema, another clear influence on ‘Kick-Ass’ (he’s called out by name in perhaps the funniest moment, Nic Cage prompting his daughter to name the Anglicized title of his first feature) plays the other angle, giving you constantly elevating action sequences with tongue firmly in cheek and everything played completely seriously. ‘Kick Ass’ wants to criticize how ridiculous the genre is, but it just ends up reveling in the violence, making the film completely disjointed and also making me worry about the minds who didn’t realize you can’t criticize comic book cinema and be a morally reprehensible example of it in the same film.

The content, hyped up due to the independent production style and apparently decadent source material, is not even offensive enough to produce a quality response off of direct response alone. It’s one-time use of the C-Word, strategically concealed breasts, and CGI blood are closer to the comedy of ‘Austin Powers’ than something actually shocking, cineastes in a world with David Cronenberg releasing movies like “Eastern Promises” (complete with steam bath blade fights and eyeballs getting ripped out) are unlikely to see ‘Kick Ass’ as pushing the envelope in any way (in a funny piece of synergy, ‘Kick-Ass’ cuts away from a finger cutting incident, while ‘Promises’ forces you into a close-up. By reveling in vigilante justice but shying away from “uglier” violence, ‘Kick Ass’ not only proves that its intentions are not that deep, but that the film is not nearly as risky as the creators want you to think it is.)

The glossy look is funnily reminiscent of the genre, and the overuse of the generic cityscape shot is an insightful knock. Touches like this pop up here and there (including a hilarious ‘Citizen Kane’ reference involving a bunch of mirrors in the last couple minutes), but the highlight of the film is Nic Cage’s Adam West impersonation as Big Daddy, perfectly monotone with a ridiculous mustache to boot. He kicks ass, yes, but by the third time it has no meaning and with a lack of interesting ‘fight mechanics’ (they may reference him, but this is FAR from John Woo quality, action wise) I was simply looking at my watch waiting for this overlong movie to end.

In researching the script and the source book, it becomes even clearer how the filmmakers sold out what could have been a cool premise to make, despite an independent production, a film that is Hollywood through and through. I’m sure our resident comics writer can correct me if I’m wrong, but iMDB suggests that the main female character leaves Kick-Ass in the novel prior to his final battles (which would have been original and far from the clichés that surround her completely inane character in the film), the film switches this out for a generic over-the-phone relationship and a by-the-book embrace in the last shot. It also tells me that in the book, Nic Cage’s characters motivations are proved to be a lie, while they are upheld and canonized in the film. It gives the movie the kind of overdone plot it started off making fun of, revealing Cage as a fraud could have given the film a whole different angle about the effect of comic books on average citizens (in the novel he lies about his previous job to justify his crime-fighting) and also about the clichés it eventually falls into (apparently, the novel reveals the bad guy as having no grudge with the Cage as was insinuated, they simply “needed a villain”, an interesting commentary on the narrative arcs of comics), but it instead just becomes every other superhero movie made, with a slightly less serious tone. While I don’t read comics, it seems the filmmakers took a truly intriguing look at comic clichés and problems within the genre regarding vigilantism and violence, and turned it into a run of the mill action film with some lame comedy about masturbation snuck in here and there.

‘Kick Ass’ has some mildly entertaining action sequences, but they all seem the same with none turned up more extreme than the others, you can walk out after the first Hit Girl sequence and you won’t have missed anything. I’ve mentioned the genre commentary evaporates by the time of the first dismemberment, but Vaughn doesn’t even keep the violence interesting from a narrative context – reactions to it are nil, with no time at all spent on how the new lifestyle would affect the mindset of these fragile characters (you would think this would be the hook of a film trying to put superhero mythology in real life), it just wants to see them blow things up. I won’t even mention the perceived racism I saw in the picture, where 14 of 15 black actors are drug dealers or schoolyard bullies, and every other villain is a greased up Italian in a penthouse. “Kick Ass” is a film where the first act endlessly parodies the overdone, uncreative, emotionally pointless superhero genre from the generic training montages to the always-terrible names, and then the third act gives into every cliché with a smile on its face and not a hinge of irony or commentary anywhere. The film attacks itself better than I ever could.

Matthew Vaughn’s “Kick Ass” gets a 2.5 out of 5