Kick-Ass (2010)

Kick-Ass starts out with a noble goal: "Why hasn't anyone ever tried to be a superhero before?" inquires the hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson). "Probably because they'd get their ass kicked," responds one of his friends. And when Dave first dons the outfit of Kick-Ass, he does get his ass thoroughly kicked, so much so that he nears death. You'd think this would stop him, but instead it screws up his nerves so that he can't feel pain as much and can endure more.

Dave is a normal High School nerd who dreams of the hot girl (Lyndsy Fonseca) and whacks off daily, with an ever-expanding collection of comic books. Fed up with getting pushed around, he becomes Kick-Ass, with the hope to do good, though he fully acknowledges he has no reason to seek vengeance: no murdered parents or otherwise.

It is sad then that the movie's best characters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) conform to the conventions of the comic book. Big Daddy is seeking revenge for one reason or another, and has trained his daughter to become a totally bad-ass killer. Yet in a movie that is trying to convey realism, it is these characters that shatter that realistic barrier, taking on dozens of villains by themselves and standing victorious over them all. And while their scenes of kick-assery provide much of the movies action thrills, I was more interested in Dave's story of grappling with the responsibility of being a superhero, rather then Big Daddy's quest to take revenge on Mob Boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Some people may find the notion of Hit Girl altogether unsettling and quite disturbing. She is, after all, a kid who kills dozens upon dozens of people. And superheroes traditionally don't kill when they have to, right? I have no moral qualms over her actions (does that make me a bad person? Maybe so), but I think the movie has a bad sense of timing in the fun it's going after. In the first scene when we see Hit Girl annihilate a crowd of baddies, it is completely awe-inspiring. But when she storms D'Amico's New York penthouse to Joan Jett's Bad Reputation, the stakes have changed, and the fun factor is all but null. In fact, when Hit Girl is getting her ass kicked, it seems like the movie is still going for laughs. What?

I really enjoyed the movie, but I can't help but pick apart it's inconsistencies, and I have one more complaint: the movie seemed to be heading in a totally unexpected direction, and for a good minute I thought that this movie would do the unexpected. But, alas, it conforms to the clichés of the genre and disappointed me somewhat. While the tone of the film would have been much darker, I think it would have been a bold way of challenging audiences. Just saying, I think they pussed out.

But, overall, the movie is still a fun entertainment. It succeeds more then the film version of Watchmen (2009) did of examining the life of a superhero, so that's something. But, in the end, it's not near the satire it quite wants to be.