Review: Kick-Ass

Seriously? If you're easily offended, you should be walking out of Kick-Ass after about...ohhh, say 10 minutes. Pack up your gummi bears and head one theater over, old fella. I hear there's a nice romantic comedy playing with that sweet girl from Friends. Kick-Ass doesn't want your thumbs up. It doesn't need it. It feeds off it's own energy, cranking the volume up to silly levels and dishes out tons of reckless, irresponsible violence. The weak need not apply.

Kick-Ass is a film that needs to be experienced, not analyzed and explained. It spits in the face of those big budgeted superhero flicks. It makes them look outdated and slow. That's Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar's specialty, applying new tweaks to old conventions, in this case breathing fresh life into the rapidly expanding world of comic book movies. He does it with his typical brand of boisterous, screaming bravado. That style of "isn't this the coolest thing ever?" didn't work when his film, Wanted, was released a couple of years ago. It wasn't nearly cool enough or original enough to warrant such swagger.

Kick-Ass is a unique idea that is so stupidly simple. The very first scene shows off exactly how condescending this film is going to be, showing a supposedly winged hero about to leap from a tall building with a single bound and soar through the skies. None of that happens, instead he crashes to the pavement below to the horror of the people below. We're introduced to Dave(Aaron Johnson), a regular teen at a regular high school with regular problems with his own identity. He and his buddies are comic book fans, the lowest rung on the geek ladder(I resemble that remark!). Aaron's not particularly noteworthy at all. He's not that cute, he's not that funny, he has no luck with the ladies. He barely exists. The notion of the regular guy living a boring, unimpressive life is a recurring them in all of Mark Millar's work. Dave wonders why nobody's ever tried being a superhero in real life before. Maybe out of a need to shake up things and be somebody important, he dons the ugliest vomit green wet suit ever and sets out to become a masked vigilante.

His first outing goes shockingly bad. We're talking knife in the ribs bad. Broken bones over his entire body bad. He's got so much metal in him after surgery he'll never pass through airport security again, but he also barely feels pain. His next battle with a group of thugs gets him a codename, Kick-Ass, and a fan following on Youtube. Not only that, but he becomes the catalyst for a number of costumed heroes to spring up. Most notably are Big Daddy(Nicolas Cage doing his best Adam West impersonation), and his daughter, the innocent yet vicious Hit-Girl(the amazing Chloe Moretz). These two make Kick-Ass look like a crossing guard by comparison.

Here's the thing, this isn't really Kick-Ass's story. He sorta falls by the wayside once Hit Girl and Big Daddy get introduced. For good reason. In Hit Girl I think Mark Millar and director Matthew Vaughn have created the iconic character of the year. She's this film's feminist McLovin, and when she's not on screen you'll wait anxiously for her to return. Some people have been having a conniption fit over the idea of a 12 year old girl slicing up grown men with katana blades, or having her father train her by shooting her in the chest. Get over it. Kick-Ass's whole point is to satirize the comic book tropes we're so used to seeing. Have you ever stopped to think about how absurd it is for Batman to have a little boy sidekick who fights crime? If transplanted into the real world, that kid's gonna be seeing some real violence, and will become just as desensitized to it as Hit-Girl is. The film is one big knock on the superhero universe, and maybe it's because I've been a reader for so long but I recognize that and love it.

Even if you're not a comic book lover, there's more than enough gratuitous violence and snarky one-liners to keep anyone happy. My only real beef is that everybody outside of the main three characters is sorta like window dressing. Even Red Mist(Christopher Mintz-Plasse), another upstart hero who befriends Kick-Ass, is sorta wasted, but without giving anything away I think he'll be a major factor in the inevitable sequel. Mark Strong(Sherlock Holmes) plays a crime boss, but really he and his gang are only there to help rack up a pretty hefty body count. I don't think Schwarzenegger killed this many dudes in Commando. There's a bit of a lag in the second half of the story once all the cool introductions have been made, but it's short and things crank back up pretty explosively soon thereafter.

It's entirely the point, but Kick-Ass doesn't remind me of any other superhero film I've seen, not even the indie flicks trying to be something different. Instead, it reminds me more of a 2001 flick called Ghost World, also based on a comic book series. Where that film took what had been years of overdone, cheesy teen comedies and bashed them with truly compelling characters and a ton of razor sharp wit, Kick-Ass does the same thing to the superhero genre. You wanna know how good Kick-Ass is? I read the comic, and gave up on it after two issues. After seeing the movie, I instantly went home and bought the entire run on Amazon, read it and loved it. It's turned me into a fanboy again.