Woogmoog

Review: Kick-Ass

Matthew Vaughn has crafted the best superhero movie this side of Watchmen in Kick-Ass. The movie’s tone is all-at-once hilarious, relentless and violent in all the right ways.

Dave Lizewski is your average comic-book nerd dreaming of something better. He spends the movie narrating for us in much the same way Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus guides us through the rules and wackiness of the world of Zombieland, or the Fight Club-style lecturing and posturing of James McAvoy in Wanted. Dave is a mere socially inept nerd and nothing more. By his narrative’s admission, if you’re looking for clichéd tales of vengeance for the death of a loved one, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Dave decides to become a superhero for an ostensibly nobler, simpler reason: to help people. Like Nite Owl I in Watchmen, it’s a good-natured (critics could call quasi-fascist) desire to make the world around them a better place. It’s all tied together quite well in the scene where our hero Kick-Ass makes his costumed YouTube debut.

“The fuck is wrong with you, man? You’d rather die for some piece of shit that you don’t even fucking know?
“The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what’s wrong with me? Yeah, I’d rather die… so bring it on!”

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of this, and I daresay hits this idealism better than Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2008’s Iron Man also comes to mind). Frankly, superheroes who just want to help feels much fresher and more honest than the overused, overcooked revenge-for-fallen-loved-one storyline.

That’s the key word I would use to describe Kick-Ass the movie – earnest. It’s a superhero movie with hyperviolence, profanity and sex, yet done honestly and without pulling any punches. Violence is visited upon 11-year-old girls, criminals and random bystanders alike – no one is “safe.”

However, again as in Watchmen, there is a darker side to the innocent, naïve “I want to help people” rationale, and that’s the whole sexual kink aspect of superheroes. Kick-Ass the superhero’s costume comprises a gimp mask and skin-tight rubber/latex/neoprene/what-have-you. Vaughn subtly brings this shade of Kick-Ass into Dave’s character and is balanced well with his ineptitude, selfishness, selflessness, naïveté and enlightenedness all at once.

Dave isn’t the only strongly realized character in the film. Mark Strong was the best part of Sherlock Holmes not named Downy, Jr. or Law, and he is wonderful here as well as Frank D’Amico, gangster-dad extraordinaire.

Chloe Moretz’s Hit-Girl is absolutely fantastic, essentially Natalie Portman from Leon writ large, expanded and spandex-ized. The violence Hit-Girl visits upon hapless bad guys is a vision to behold, filled with wonderfully gooey video game violence. They’re all a cacophonous delight not unlike the action sequences in the woefully under-appreciated Punisher: War Zone.

And Nicolas Cage…ah Nicolas Cage. I may actually kind of want to see Sorcerer’s Apprentice now, if only to hope for a hat trick from him over the past couple of movies, from this and the ingenious Bad Lieutenant. From his affectionate training of daughter Hit-Girl to the wonderful Adam West cadence he adopts while in his Batman-esque Big Daddy persona (“back to headquarters, Hit-Girl!), Cage is a delight throughout. While played for laughs at their introduction, there are some truly moving scenes between Cage and Moretz later on in the film.

Kick-Ass is riddled to the brim with all sorts of lip-service and homages to the likes of Watchmen, the Avengers, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, etc. The film wears these inspirations on its sleeve, so if you enjoy that sort of stuff there’s plenty to go around.

The movie could be considered a companion piece to that other Mark Millar comic adaptation, Wanted, as well as the lovely Zombieland from last year. To an extent, these movies are about heroes having the balls to stand up and change things around them, to no longer be a passive observer and get off your ass. However, where something like Wanted gets a pass for its problems because of Timur Bekmambetov’s over-the-top, dynamic and insane directing, Matthew Vaughan has fashioned an exciting, solidly paced and well-rounded action movie.

You could make a pretty great triple-feature out of Zombieland, Wanted and Kick-Ass.

BOTTOM LINE: brutal violence in the vein of Punisher: War Zone, comic book superheroes in the vein of Watchmen all while being a hilarious, entertaining, well-rounded fucking good time

9.4/10