Kick-Ass

I haven't been going to the movie theater a lot lately. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, movie-going in London in 2010 is a ludicrously expensive proposition for a poor graduate student: I paid £11.20 for Kick-Ass, which - for reference - was a pound more than I paid to see Avatar last December. In IMAX 3-D. Second, I haven't been all that excited about many films coming out lately. Nor is that likely to change anytime soon soon: I realized yesterday that I could only think of two movies coming out over the summer that I have any interest in (Iron Man 2 and Inception, in case you're curious). But I'll leave that slightly sad state of affairs for another post.

Anyway, Kick-Ass was sort of a departure for me, since I went to see it without first reading any reviews. I suppose you could make the argument that a reviewer should form his or her own opinion of a movie cold, but since I'm less a "legitimate reviewer" and more "some guy writing reviews on his blog that about six people, optimistically, might read," I'm not inclined to be a purist on that point.

The good news was that my £11.20 was well spent. Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn (who also gave the world L4yer Cake, a great Daniel Craig gangster movie), is a whole lot of fun. Adapted from a recently-published comic book series, it's the story of a completely nondescript teenage New Yorker named Dave Lizewsky (Aaron Johnson) who wonders why nobody has ever tried to be a real-life superhero, and with an admirably plucky attitude, gives it a go. Johnson, incidentally, is British, but you wouldn't know it from listening to him here. His first crime-fighting effort (as his green-clad alter ego Kick-Ass) nets him a stab wound and a number of broken bones, but he persists and becomes an internet sensation, drawing the attention of a pair of rather more serious costumed crime-fighters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, in his best role in years) and his foul-mouthed, knife-loving 11-year-old daughter, Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), who are in the middle of a battle against drug kingpin Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) and his teenaged son Christopher (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, aka McLovin from Superbad). While enormous quantities of violence occur, Dave also has to deal with some more mundane issues, like convincing his crush Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) that he's not gay.

It being a film based on a comic book, much of what occurs is successfully played for laughs, particularly the not-overlong scenes in the high school, where Dave is carefully sketched as a painfully normal guy rather than a parody nerd, and the numerous but not overwhelming pop culture references. But much of the humor is violence-based. This is a movie that, true to its name, features an enormous quantity of brutality both inflicted and suffered by almost all the main characters: at regular intervals, limbs are broken, people are stabbed, shot, beaten and blown up, and several minor characters meet disturbing ends at the hands of various pieces of industrial equipment. In this, Kick-Ass walks a very, very careful line. As a superhero parody piece which takes a swing at the eternal question of whether costumed vigilantism would work in real life, it has to acknowledge reality - that it wouldn't - while providing entertainment and a satisfying narrative. The movie's approach (minor spoilers ahead) is to simply change its approach to reality over its running time. It starts as a relatively realistic story in which Kick-Ass's crime-fighting efforts are marred by a lack of superpowers, with the exception of the deadened nerve endings he receives in the first of several severe beatings he's treated to over the course of the movie,* and concludes with him battling an army of goons at the controls of an extremely improbable flying machine mounted with a pair of small but highly effective Gatling guns.

As awkward as this narrative structure sounds as I write it, it's probably the only approach that would actually work. If the movie were cartoonish from start to finish, it couldn't really sell the "superheros in the real world" angle, and if it went down Gritty Realism Avenue, the already questionable aspects - like the idea of a vengeance-seeking father training his 11-year-old daughter in the ways of murder and mayhem - would be impossibly disturbing. By making the movie less and less realistic as it goes on, Vaughn manages to avoid plummeting into either one of those pits. But the proof of its effectiveness is that there's no one jarring point where pseudo-realism gives way to wish-fulfillment; the movie carefully doles out increasing measures of ridiculousness so that when Kick-Ass finally appears with his deus-ex-miniguns, the reaction is less "Oh come on" and more "Oh hell yes!"

The inevitable compromise to this that the movie doesn't really have a point. There are a few feints in the direction of a point about society's apathy towards violence, but nothing that adds up to anything. Fortunately, the whole thing is handled with such speed and vigor as to render the absence of meaning pretty much irrelevant. You might not learn anything, but you won't feel like your £11 was wasted, either.

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* The same beatdown also results in his acquisition of a collection of surgical metal plates throughout his body. "Just like Wolverine!" he enthuses, although as the owner of an admittedly less impressive set of metal implants, I can assure you that as armor plating, they're somewhat worse than useless.