Image from a poster for Joseph Golden's The Great Gamble, 1919
When I saw Kick-Ass over the weekend, I went in not knowing much about it. I knew that it was the adaptation of a comic book of the same name about teens who decide to become superheroes in a world without superpowers. But I got the impression that that's more than most of the people in the theater knew about the movie - now, I wonder how my viewing of Kick-Ass would have been different if I had either (a) read the comic before seeing the movie, or (b) not known it was based on a comic at all. It shouldn't make that much of a difference, right? But I get the feeling that my two big grievances with the movie are based on now much I knew about it going in.
Which is not to say that I didn't like Kick-Ass - I enjoyed it quite a lot. Set within the last couple years (the extensive use of Myspace by the movie's characters already dates the movie a little), the movie's main character is Dave Lizewski, an inconspicuous high-schooler who decides to become a masked vigilante called Kick-Ass. The problem with Dave's character is that he's an empty costume at the center of the story. The script does a good job of plausibly getting him into his costume but, once he's wearing his green wetsuit and mask, he doesn't really DO anything. A single act of well-documented vigilantism gets him some media attention, but he never gets a chance to develop any kind of "superhero" identity before getting swept up (largely as an observer) in a much larger existing conflict between the mafia and a couple other underground vigilantes, Big Daddy and Hit-Girl. The accelerated sequence of events, going straight from "his origin story" to "out of his depth", makes me think that the story was compressed by necessity to get the comic series' full plot line into a two-hour run-time. But I haven't read the comic, so I don't know for sure. All I know is that I would have enjoyed the movie a bit more if Kick-Ass had been a little less of a passive protagonist.
Once Kick-Ass gets into its second section, it's really all about the pre-teen Hit-Girl and her father/mentor, the ex-cop who calls himself Big Daddy. The duo have a plan to take down the D'Amico crime family, which they have been carrying out quietly since before Dave took masked vigilantism into the news. The thing that made the biggest impression in this part of the movie is the graphic violence (which is kicked up a couple notches from the already-grisly first action sequences), and the fact that it is an 11-year-old girl who is instigating the bloodshed. I think Kick-Ass does a good job of showing just how NOT NORMAL Hit-Girl and her dad are - there's no glossing over the sociopathy involved in their pursuits. But the consequences are never fully addressed, and this is another thing that I would guess was handled better in the comic series.
Those two issues aside, Kick-Ass is a thoroughly enjoyable, hyper-violent, funny, and (I'll admit) thought-provoking superhero movie. The script defies the audience's expectations to humorous effect at many points, and the performances are all quite good. Even Nicholas Cage chooses the appropriate variety of scenery-chewing for the movie he's acting in, which happens rarely these days. Because it's hard-boiled detective story structure and it doesn't gloss over the ugly consequences of crime-fighting, it is a very different animal than some viewers might expect, but it is a good story told well when taken on its own terms.
"This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" by Sparks
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