“With no power comes no responsibility,” smirks high school student Dave Lizewski (aka Kick-Ass) over halfway through British director Matthew Vaughn’s slick, smug bubblegum-burst of a superhero movie. “Except that’s totally not true.”
This essentially meaningless inversion of Lizewski’s Marvel stablemate Peter Parker’s motto – one wonders which half of the original aphorism is “totally not true,” for starters – is ultimately an apt summation of a film that tries to have its cake, eat it and noisily smash the plate against the wall.
Aiming at once for nihilism and cuddliness, Vaughn delights in a long and loose moral leash, as an 11 year-old girl guns down corridors full of grown men without batting an eyelid, but steers clear of truly subversive thinking. Or much thinking at all.
The “Spider-Man” reference is intended to ram home the concept of Lizewski (gamely played by Aaron Johnson, curiously resembling John Lennon slightly more here than he did in the Lennon biopic “Nowhere Boy”) as a YouTube-generation Peter Parker: both are four-eyed, put-upon teenaged geeks spurred into assuming positions of moral authority by a lifetime of bullying, landing implausibly hot girlfriends in the process.
But where Parker is gifted with supernatural ability, the most appealing story hook of “Kick-Ass” is that Lizewski begins his quest to rid his town of criminal activity armed only with a mail-order wetsuit and moves gleaned from years of comic-reading. When, defeated by muggers, he begins applying his dubious skills to rescuing stray cats, the film promises a disarming take on the practicalities of heroism in the modern world.
However, as he shifts his focus to stock underworld villains, and becomes little more than a red herring for the true heroine of the piece, the much-vaunted pre-teen vigilante Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz, testing the bounds of precocity that she already stretched in “(500) Days of Summer”), the film rather collapses in on itself, using only saltier language and expensive firearms to color up hoary good-versus-evil structures.
By the time it ends with moral order temporarily restored (the sequel hook is blatant) and even Hit-Girl safely absorbed into the system, this snappy, good-looking film (special kudos to Sammy Sheldon’s costumes) appears to have backed down to a tamer motto of “anarchy is okay in moderation.” After the bolder political strides that “The Dark Knight” took with the comic-book movie, “Kick-Ass” can’t help seeming mouthy and overstimulated by comparison.
That tentativeness wouldn’t be bothersome if the film didn’t congratulate itself at every given opportunity for being so very meta, whether via Nicolas Cage’s fitfully amusing appropriation of Adam West’s Batman mannerisms for the role of Hit-Girl’s father, or Lizewski’s finger-wagging reminder of the possibilities of posthumous voiceover. (Why yes, I have seen “Sunset Boulevard.” And not for a moment did I think you were going there.)
As such, the film represents only the shallowest form of postmodernism: ironically recalling the window-dressing of past culture without revealing anything fresh about the present. Admittedly, that’s asking a lot of a superhero movie, but then “Kick-Ass” asks a lot of itself.
Comments
34 responses to “SHORT TAKE: “Kick-Ass” (**)”
Do you mean Kick-Ass is a “small picture”? :p
Ha, that’s our regular Short Take format. Sometimes 500 words is enough for even the biggest of pictures.
Oh no, I was referring to the famous quote from Sunset Boulevard. I didn’t handle it well, I know :p
And yes, I don’t see how this is short, since it is more or less as long as Ebert’s reviews. For example, your Hurt Locker review is as long as Ebert’s average “great movies” review. Not that I think length is an important factor for quality.
Ah, I see our lines got crossed. The reference to “Sunset Boulevard” comes in the film itself.
But yes, in the sense you’re implying, it’s certainly a “small picture” ;)
Well, I LOVED the movie, it’s been a long time since I really liked a movie so much that I wanted to go watch it again directly.
Can’t wait to not see this
it seems to not be a critic friendly movie
Actually, the critical reaction so far has been largely positive. Variety and The Guardian are just two of the notable raves out there.
5 Stars from Empire too. I haven’t seen it yet but the movie must be overrated and therefore not as much fun as could be.
ill give it a chance because most of what ive heard is positive,
thanks for adding to the conversation like always chad
Chloe Grace Moretz will get awards attention.
Yeah, Teen Choice is in the bag!
Thank God someone besides me didn’t like it.
http://bit.ly/9CKbw0
Bradshaws reasoning for liking the film is his reasoning for hating Basterds. Go figure.
You’ve succeeded in writing a negative review of this thing without being threatened with a single evisceration by rabid fanboys, so far. I salute you!
Nothing the Guardian has ever written is notable.
And whlist I didn’t care that much for this either, I liked it a lot more than you. I certainly didn’t feel cheated and I disagree with the notion that the film was self-congratulatory – I never thought it was taking itself too seriously. I thought it was well cast and well acted but there were definite script problems.
The movie was great. People need to lighten up…most of the negative reviews out there are harping on “moral irresponsibility.” Whatever.
Except mine doesn’t. If anything, I don’t think the film delivers sufficiently on its promise of moral irresponsibility.
Yes I meant with the exception of yours. MOST of them cite that, which is ridiculous and puritanical
Wait, why? If there’s something about it that’s morally dubious or repulsive, why NOT single it out as a problem?
Some of the worst movies ever made were despised precisely for their moral irresponsibility. Have we gotten to a point where drawing some sort of line in that regard makes one “uncool?”
tony rock needs a hug
Absolutely zero interest.
Zero interest in the film, or zero interest in tony rock?
I don’t for the life of me understand how you can consider ‘Kick-Ass’ to be of approximate equal value to ‘The Young Victoria’– which you also gave two stars. Or does your grading scale have a lot of give?
Both.
BTW, to Robert Hamer: Yes, we have long ago stepped over that borderline between morality and coolness. To be cool is not to care about any of that kee-rap…or so the “cool” say. This is because being cool is such a slippery goal that any possibilities must be left open.
Adam M: I don’t really understand why I can’t rate the films equally — my respective issues with them are wildly different, of course, but they both fall way short for me. Apples and oranges are both fruit, after all.
That said, people place far too much stock in star ratings — the review is what matters.
Is this a movie review or a review of the reviewer’s sense of morality.
Arjay: Clearly, you put more thought into crafting that neat little soundbite than you did into reading my review, as it’s quite clear that my objections to the film are aesthetic rather than moral.
I must be losing my subversive streak but I really did feel this was fanboy wank and the Moretz character!!!??? Yup, thin line boys…I think you know what I mean.
” If anything, I don’t think the film delivers sufficiently on its promise of moral irresponsibility.”
Exactly. Pretty much summed up exactly what was wrong with the film. Moretz is great playing Hit Girl, but it’s panto violence and completely misses the mark in terms of adaptation.
If the people who gush about the movie were honest, they were sold on it the moment they heard a kid say, ‘cunt’ irrespective of what it was actually about.
Also, they’re supposed to be inverting the superhero, not giving him the same happy, guy-gets-girl ending.
I sympathise a lot with Robert — we shouldn’t feel scared to object to things on both moral AND aesthetic grounds, if need be. One criticism does not trump the other, though the latter one is certainly easier to pull off. It’s a juvenile, Oscar Wilde-ish pose to pretend that morality is not relevant to a piece of art — and equally silly to pretend in a Daily Mail-ish way that it’s the only thing that is.
That said, I agree with Guy and Nick DC that the main problem with Kick-Ass was its hypocritical posturing: flinging out plenty of hiply amoral attitude, but not having the balls, skill or frankly style to follow through.
I’ll have to judge for myself when I finally see the film (which, despite some highly negative reviews, I still am excited about seeing), but I have to say that the idea of not dealing with the ambiguity of murder being committed by a young child is, at the very least, uninteresting. And if Guy is right, that this film doesn’t truly follow through on its balls-to-the-wall amoral mayhem, it sounds like a missed choice on the director’s part.
And if Ebert’s description is correct (in so far as there’s quite a lot of firefights, as opposed to hand-to-hand combat), that doesn’t sound terribly interesting to me, either.
It played like it was trying to be subversive to the genre and then proceeded to pull the same trite conventions.