"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Kick-Ass (2010, R)

I’m glad I saw Kingsmen (by Mark Millar, the same graphic novelist who wrote Kick-Ass,) before I saw this movie.  If I hadn’t (and if I hadn’t known the connection,) I’d have been totally thrown by the hyper-violent action scenes and profane irreverence; I remember seeing the trailers and getting the impression that it was a fairly light superhero comedy.  But between Wanted, Kingsmen, and now Kick-Ass, I’m definitely learning my way around Mark Millar’s M.O.

Dave Lizewski is a painfully normal teenage boy who, tired of always being the coward who doesn’t fight back, takes a page from his favorite comic books and becomes a masked vigilante.  He gets himself a costume, a pair of fighting batons, and a dial-a-hero-style Myspace page, and sets out to make a difference in the world.  As the masked Kick-Ass, he takes on thugs and petty criminals, and while he’s not especially adept at it, he starts a bona fide superhero craze, earning the adulation of the inspired masses.  Unfortunately, his high profile catches the attention of a crime lord who doesn’t need a nemesis, and he gets in way over his head – especially when he connects with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, a similarly-masked duo who aren’t messing around.

Mark Millar, it seems, specializes in show-the-blood stories.  I mean, in your average PG-13 superhero movie, you know that the heroes are taking out the bad guys, and there are fists and specialized weapons and explosions, but you don’t really see the blood, and you use words out “beat” or “take out” rather than “kill.”  In movies based on Mark Millar’s stories, you see the blood – the violence is up-close and visceral, and it doesn’t let up.  (For a non-Millar example, think of the difference between The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.  There’s plenty of fighting and killing in both, but Game of Thrones is infinitely more show-the-blood.)

That approach really works here.  In Kick-Ass’s first forays into heroism, it shows Dave that crime-fighting isn’t a lark; it’s dangerous.  These early beatdowns are pretty standardly-choreographed, but more audacious, highly-stylized stuff comes later.  Hit-Girl in particular is a larger-than-life lethal figure, made all the more insane by the fact that she’s only eleven.  Her first fight scene is one of the highlights of the film, and as Dave watches her handily eviscerate a roomful of tough customers twice her size, he sees just how lamentably unprepared he is for this job.  He never comes out and says it, but I think he was envisioning something similar to how Spider-Man handles small-time crooks:  beat them up and then leave them giftwrapped for the cops.  He’s not ready to deal with the thought of actually killing people, of knives and guns and blood, and the movie addresses this disconnect between vigilantism in theory and in practice.

This movie features a precognizant Quicksilver reunion, as it stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson (The Avengers) as Dave and features Evan Peters (X-Men) as one of his friends.  I’ve loved Chloë Grace Moretz since Hugo, and she’s all kinds of awesome as Hit-Girl.  Mark Strong is effective as the main baddie, and Nikita’s Lyndsy Fonseca is kind of wasted as Dave’s love interest.  I honestly don’t know what to make of Nicholas Cage’s Big Daddy – more than anything, it brings to mind the Community episode where Abed takes the “Nicholas Cage:  Good or Bad?” class.

Warnings

The old ultraviolence, lots of swearing, alcohol/drug use, sexual content, and disturbing images.

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