In Kick-Ass, the latest movie from director Matthew Vaughn (Stardust), many of the basic superhero story beats are covered: the origin stories, the disposable henchmen, the meticulously choreographed fight scenes, the expected deus ex machina plot lines.
But, regardless of its familiarity, there’s a certain magic to Kick-Ass. The movie, based off a recent comic of the same name, is created lovingly and more or less faithfully, unafraid of bald references to other genre films and uncompromising in its profanity and violence.
And that profanity (heavy and often spoken by an 11-year-old girl) and violence (unflinching and brutal) are probably two of the movies main selling points — no one is pulling any punches, and the film’s R rating is a hard one.
It also lends gravitas to the film’s sometimes goofy proceedings. The movie, which follows perpetually bland, comic book-obsessed loser Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, Nowhere Boy) in his transformation to the wetsuit-wearing, baton-twirling superhero Kick-Ass, doesn’t bother romanticizing serious elements.
When a character gets stabbed with a small knife, he doesn’t walk it off so easily: He bleeds. When characters are tied up and beaten, the film’s comedic tone vanishes, because the violence somehow seems so real.
Not to forget, though, that the film is ultimately a comedy. The silly premise begets ridiculous characters like Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz, (500) Days of Summer), Big Daddy (a gleefully ridiculous Nicolas Cage, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans) and Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Year One, who does a good enough job to largely shed his McLovin branding).
When Hit-Girl first dispatches a room full of bad guys in spectacularly violent fashion, it’s soundtracked to The Dickies’ sugary “Banana Splits.” This, of course, is after she barters with her dad: He gets to shoot her in the chest three times to test her bulletproof vest, only if she gets an ice cream sundae afterward.
As the movie plods onward and Kick-Ass entangles himself further in the evil plots of drug kingpin Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong, Sherlock Holmes), the tone darkens significantly without becoming any sort of self-serious mess. A stylized scene of Big Daddy eviscerating a room full of henchmen — using suspenseful music and slow motion in ways Zack Snyder could never quite harness — is tense, compared to Hit-Girl’s bubblegum beatdown earlier. And the scene where our heroes find themselves in their most dire situation is dark and harrowing.
It’s a shame, then, that there’s so much the movie could have explored if only it had another hour or so to do it. Big Daddy and Hit-Girl’s backstory is dealt with well enough, but it’s done in a short blast of (admittedly stylish) exposition that doesn’t do justice to the oddity of the whole thing. Dave’s relationship with his girlfriend (Lyndsy Fonseca, Hot Tub Time Machine) is a nice counter to the wish-fulfillment superhero world he inhabits as Kick-Ass, but her plotline (and a few other characters’ backstories as well) are wrapped up way too quickly and conveniently.
But even some of the less-established characters work on their own merits, such as how Clark Duke (Hot Tub Time Machine) steals every scene he’s in as Dave’s friend Marty.
It’s just unfortunate that so much had to be packed into two hours. All the main characters, especially the ones moonlighting as costumed vigilantes, come from such interesting places, so it’s too bad the audience can’t spend more time with all of them.
But if taken more at face value — it’s a bunch of unlikely superheroes working to take down a murderous drug lord and not much else — Kick-Ass is as much fun as a movie can be. It trades its adrenaline-fueled fight scenes with funny and quieter character moments, adding just the right amount of comic book touch to help the audience remember exactly what they’re watching.
Because the movie is just a comic book, really, and it’s hard to tell if it’s actually commenting on why these people dress up and fight crime — see Snyder’s Watchmen — or it’s just embracing the craziness of it all. Either way, there’s a great, if slightly left-of-center, superhero movie here. Just go along and enjoy the absurdity.
jwolper@umdbk.com
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
