Kick-Ass

It wasn’t a dying plan­et that cre­at­ed the super­hero. It was rage and frus­tra­tion, dis­place­ment and anx­i­ety, inad­e­qua­cy and fear. The com­ic-book was a fortress of soli­tude, but Ellis Island – not Kryp­ton – was its spir­i­tu­al home; the gate­way to Amer­i­ca for a gen­er­a­tion of immi­grants whose sons would rein­vent them­selves in the rip­pling red capes of extra­or­di­nary men.

But pan­el by pan­el, hero by hero, movie by movie, the fan­ta­sy of pow­er has become a real­i­ty for the com­ic-book indus­try. In the last decade, as its muta­tion has been fuelled by the super serum of box office dol­lars, those artists and writ­ers who imag­ined the world of tomor­row have been replaced by stu­dio exec­u­tives fix­at­ed on today.

They have giv­en us the Gold­en Age of com­ic-book adap­ta­tions, but the fac­to­ry fran­chis­es of Mar­vel and DC are no longer the cre­ative engines of the com­ic-book com­mu­ni­ty. Inde­pen­dent comics have emerged, pro­vid­ing a plat­form for char­ac­ters and ideas unmoored from the mainstream.

Slow­ly, both the pub­lish­ers and the film stu­dios have come to realise that there is an appetite for com­ic-book cin­e­ma beyond the cos­tumed cru­sad­er. But the super­hero remains the pre­serve of the big bud­get block­buster. Like the char­ac­ters them­selves, the inde­pen­dent super­hero movie remained a fig­ment of the imag­i­na­tion – an impos­si­bil­i­ty. Until now.

Because writer Mark Mil­lar and direc­tor Matthew Vaughn have com­bined to cre­ate a film that breaks the rules. A super­hero movie con­ceived out­side the stu­dio sys­tem for just $30 mil­lion. A com­ic-book adap­ta­tion that’s both dead­ly seri­ous and light of touch. An inven­tive, destruc­tive, serene­ly psy­chot­ic movie that gets being very, very wrong so very, very right. And it, too, has a secret iden­ti­ty: hid­den with­in the blood, the vio­lence, the bul­let smoke and bro­ken bones is the most riotous­ly enjoy­able super­hero movie you’ll ever see.

Kick-Ass is rebuke, riposte, satire and love-let­ter rolled into one. With its bub­blegum colours, its know­ing wit and puls­ing sound­track, this is Millar’s answer to the pon­der­ous mythol­o­gy of the mod­ern superhero.

Kick-Ass may self-con­scious­ly evoke clas­sic com­ic-book arche­types, but in crank­ing up the sex and vio­lence, and ton­ing down the self-impor­tance, Mil­lar has avoid­ed the vogue for ​‘matu­ri­ty’ embod­ied by Watch­men and The Dark Knight, and recre­at­ed the spir­it of pure teenage delight that comics at their best indulge.

Dave Lizews­ki (Aaron John­son) is an ordi­nary kid at an Amer­i­can high-school whose only super pow­er is being invis­i­ble to long-time crush Katie Deaux­ma (Lyn­dsy Fon­se­ca). Along with best friends Todd (Evan Peters) and Mar­ty (Clark Duke), Dave’s life revolves around comics and videogames. But Dave has grand ambi­tions – when he’s not vig­or­ous­ly jerk­ing off to his well-endowed Eng­lish teacher, Mrs Zane, he’s dream­ing of becom­ing a super­hero. All it takes, he says, is the per­fect mix­ture of naivety and opti­mism. One bright green wet­suit with gold trim lat­er, a leg­end is born.

With the advice of his unsus­pect­ing friends ring­ing in his ears (“Dude, if any­body did it in real life, they’d get their ass kicked!”), Kick-Ass hits the streets. But after a back alley show­down with a pair of thugs, it quick­ly becomes clear to both Lizews­ki and the audi­ence that we’re not in Smal­l­ville anymore.

Nor is Kick-Ass the only masked avenger in town. Cos­tumed mani­ac Big Dad­dy (Nico­las Cage) and his daugh­ter Hit Girl are jack­ing the ship­ments of drug king­pin Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). As the heroes’ paths cross in an increas­ing­ly crowd­ed New York City, D’Amico and his trou­bled son Chris (Christo­pher Mintz-Plasse) pre­pare to send their own mes­sage to the cos­tumed community.

Begin­ning with a trum­pet riff that evokes John Williams’ leg­endary Super­man theme, only to segue into the hor­ri­ble crash land­ing of an Armen­ian schiz­o­phrenic, the film’s pre-cred­its sequence per­fect­ly cap­tures a tone of arch black humour that treads a fine line between the old and the new, the expect­ed and the unpredictable.

Kick-Ass is indebt­ed to the com­ic-book clichés that allow Vaughn to sketch out his char­ac­ters in cin­e­mat­ic short hand. His allu­sions to clas­sic super­heroes (Super­man; Peter Park­er; Big Daddy’s ersatz Bat­man cos­tume; Lizewski’s own reac­tion to an X‑ray of his re-engi­neered body – ​“Dude, I look like frikkin’ Wolver­ine!”) tell us every­thing we need to know about our pro­tag­o­nists’ self-per­cep­tion. They’re also a mark of the film’s con­fi­dence: Vaughn has seen the same super­hero movies as us; he shares our expec­ta­tions, and he knows how to con­found them.

But for all that the film may be built on com­ic-book con­ven­tions, there has nev­er been an adap­ta­tion that feels quite like it. Kick-Ass cer­tain­ly isn’t the first post-mod­ern super­hero, but as a prod­uct of MySpace and YouTube rather than The Dai­ly Plan­et or Bugle, he is an orig­i­nal web slinger. Just like the com­ic itself, which Mil­lar launched with a series of fake social net­work­ing pages and inter­net videos, Kick-Ass is an online phe­nom­e­non, a viral avenger, a hero for the real­i­ty TV age.

The real and the unre­al are here inte­grat­ed as nev­er before, result­ing in a super­hero who tru­ly feels like an Every­man. Even (per­haps espe­cial­ly) when in cos­tume, Kick-Ass embod­ies the inad­e­qua­cies of those orig­i­nal com­ic-book cre­ators. Unlike tra­di­tion­al heroes, that cos­tume is Dave Lizewski’s secret iden­ti­ty – and if he doesn’t realise that at the start of his jour­ney, it is made bru­tal­ly clear to him by the end.

What Vaughn cap­tures in a way no oth­er com­ic-book direc­tor can is a chill­ing anx­i­ety at the nature and con­se­quences of Lizewski’s hero­ism. Super­man, Spi­der-Man and Bat­man may suf­fer on screen, but it is dis­tant – exis­ten­tial. Put Bat­man in a room full of drug deal­ers and you feel a sneak­ing sym­pa­thy for the bad guys. But when Kick-Ass is faced with the same, and the drug deal­ers are armed to the teeth, the dan­ger to his life is real, the fear palpable.

And that is the point. With­out this dan­ger, Kick-Ass’ hero­ism would be an illu­sion. ​“If great respon­si­bil­i­ty only comes with great pow­er, what does that say about the rest of us?” he asks, blood­ied and bro­ken after a beat­ing from D’Amico’s goons. In com­ic-books, the bystanders are sup­posed to wait around until the hero shows up, but Kick-Ass is both bystander and hero rolled into one.

If only they’d had the courage to keep it that way. But the film ulti­mate­ly defies its own log­ic. It des­per­ate­ly wants to play by real-world rules, but hap­pi­ly breaks them when­ev­er the nar­ra­tive demands. By the film’s finale, Kick-Ass has become both bold­er and bland­er – more tra­di­tion­al­ly hero­ic, and so con­se­quent­ly less human.

But if all that makes the film sound heavy on the sub­text, the sur­face delights are uni­form­ly thrilling. Set-pieces are destruc­tive­ly chore­o­graphed and filmed with ruth­less panache. There are no head-spin­ning cuts, just an ele­gant bal­let of car­nage that allows the audi­ence to drink in every head shot, every knife to the chest, every blood-drenched dis­mem­ber­ment. Kick-Ass is both shock­ing­ly vio­lent and riotous­ly fun­ny, with a script from Vaughn and Jane Gold­man that push­es at the bound­aries of respectabil­i­ty and then breaks right on through.

Their love of com­ic-book cul­ture is clear, with nods and winks to clas­sic titles along­side a sharp satire of the industry’s ten­den­cy to com­mer­cialise and exploit the lat­est trends. Vaughn also shows an unashamed affin­i­ty for videogame aes­thet­ics, most obvi­ous­ly in the scene where Hit Girl takes out a room­ful of bad guys in a man­ner lift­ed straight out of Mod­ern Warfare.

If 2009 was the year in which Aaron John­son was a poten­tial movie star look­ing for a break­out role, Kick-Ass is the film in which he deliv­ers on the promise. His mus­cu­lar phys­i­cal­i­ty trans­lates into a com­mand­ing screen pres­ence, scarce­ly con­cealed beneath Dave Lizewski’s cracked voice, glass­es and greasy hair. It’s that abil­i­ty to sub­sume him­self in a char­ac­ter despite mat­inée idol looks that will serve him well in future, as will a sur­pris­ing­ly light com­ic touch, giv­en full vent in one of the film’s stand­out scenes – Lizewski’s delu­sion­al De Niro moment in front of his bed­room mirror.

Along­side John­son, 13-year-old Chloe Moretz gives an aston­ish­ing­ly mature (and foul-mouthed) per­for­mance as Hit Girl, an exten­sion of her work in the recent (500) Days of Sum­mer. She con­vinc­ing­ly moulds inno­cence and vio­lence into a coher­ent whole, with a stand­out moment against mul­ti­ple thugs in D’Amico’s pent­house apart­ment that may well go down in geek his­to­ry as one of the all time great on screen fights.

Scored to Joan Jett’s ​‘Bad Rep­u­ta­tion’, it’s also anoth­er exam­ple of the film’s flaw­less music choic­es, which include superb use of Sparks’ ​‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’, and Gnarls Barkley’s ​‘Crazy’. And after a decade of dis­ap­point­ments, Nic Cage fol­lows his deranged turn in Wern­er Herzog’s Bad Lieu­tenant with anoth­er sur­prise. His campy, creepy, Adam West-inspired Big Dad­dy evokes mem­o­ries of that younger, edgi­er actor before the pay-cheque per­for­mances dimin­ished his reputation.

As an exer­cise in raw, pure, cin­e­mat­ic fun, it’s gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult to find fault with the bub­ble gum blitzkrieg of Kick-Ass. Even its occa­sion­al mis­steps, like the lin­ger­ing close-up on a giant bill­board of Clau­dia Schif­fer (aka Mrs Matthew Vaughn), seem more like self-dep­re­cat­ing in-jokes than com­mer­cial hypocrisy. Among the heavy hit­ters of the super­hero genre, it may not be the biggest, but Kick-Ass is def­i­nite­ly the bright­est, and it may just be the best.