Kick-Ass | Little White Lies

Kick-Ass

01 Apr 2010 / Released: 02 Apr 2010

Two people dressed as superheroes, one wearing a Batman-style costume and the other a purple-haired figure in a black leather outfit, standing in a bedroom filled with pop culture memorabilia.
Two people dressed as superheroes, one wearing a Batman-style costume and the other a purple-haired figure in a black leather outfit, standing in a bedroom filled with pop culture memorabilia.
4

Anticipation.

Emerged from relative obscurity with a sneak peak that sent the crowds crazy at Comic-Con in 2009.

5

Enjoyment.

Sexy, violent, sharply scripted and brilliantly performed, Kick-Ass is a breath of fresh air.

5

In Retrospect.

With Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim on the way later this year, Kick-Ass may be a harbinger of things to come.

Sexy, vio­lent, sharply script­ed and bril­liant­ly per­formed, Matthew Vaughn’s com­ic book romp is a breath of fresh air.

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fuelled by the super serum of box office dol­lars, those artists and writ­ers who imag­ined the world of tomor­row have been replaced by stu­dio exec­u­tives fix­at­ed on today.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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.