March 2010
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Kick-Ass (15)
Posted 26th March 2010

With no studio funding, comes no responsibility; a fact Matthew Vaughn has made the most of for his adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s violent-but-visionary alternate-world comic book origin story Kick-Ass.

“How come nobody’s ever tried to be a superhero?” ponders protagonist Dave Lizewski (the about to blow-up English Aaron Johnson – Nowhere Boy) near the beginning of this super superhero-deconstruction flick. Well... answers swiftly follow...

A normal, unnoticed, average High School student with normal, unnoticed, average, fellow funny book-reading friends (the great Clark Duke and Evan Peters) that crush on popular, noticed, non-funny book-reading girls (such as the uber-cute Lyndsy Fonseca), Dave daydreams of becoming a superhero in order to escape his everyday, downtown New York, frequently mugged existence.

Putting theory into practice, Dave orders a wetsuit off the internet and begins some intense (“ahem”) self-training to be all he can be, despite the fact he has no powers whatsoever. Hitting the streets, Dave first encounters giggles then gangbangers who do a bang-up job of totally fucking him up. One extended stay in hospital later, Dave emerges stronger (thanks to titanium-reinforced bones: “I’m like Wolverine!”) and pain-impervious (thanks to irreplaceably-damaged nerve endings) and reborn and refocused as costumed hero Kick-Ass.

He soon learns however that he’s well out of his depth after Mafia Don Frank D’Amico (rent-a-gravelly-voiced bad guy Mark Strong – Sherlock Holmes/RocknRolla) sets his sights upon him to teach other potential heroes a lesson, and not alone in the costumed department as fellow capes Hit-Girl (the wicked Chloe Moretz, more on whom later) and Big Daddy (one hamtastic Nic Cage, also more on whom later) raise the crime-busting and criminal-eviscerating stakes (in gloriously-gory fashion).

A superhero-deconstruction comic book adaptation NOT for all ages, Kick-Ass comes at ya with a full-on frontal assault that many will delight and whoop in, but Daily Mail readers will be up in arms at, thanks to its perversion of your classic superhero origin story by an overarching anarchic sensibility. In a bullet-casing, what’s on show here is a cross-hybrid of Spider-man and Kill Bill. I know, sounds like neek-teen, wish-fulfilment, movie-heaven huh? To be fair, it’s not far off either.

There’s the look of the film: Tarantinoesque-meets-old-school Marvel (and I don’t mean that as a criticism of Vaughn’s own style or the homaging choices he’s made here but as a compliment). In fact the film was much brighter in palette than I personally expected, in comparison to reading the original graphic material, which actually works perfectly for the tweaked lighter tone of the movie. There’s the identifiable teen hero; with problems, issues and ambitions we might all have had at some point (à la Peter Parker). There’s the appealing, some might say, character-actors performances as the Kick-Ass cast giving everyone at least an interesting slant, if not a fully three-dimensional real feel. There’s the quotable zingers that Vaughn is fast becoming as synonymous with as his former partner-in-crime Guy Ritchie already is. There’s extreme action of the glouriously (sic) OTT-nature, with frequent accompanied blood and guts and gore. There’s extreme(r) cursive language, no swear word too offensive to be uttered; the last two of these best executed and exemplified by one of the most memorably potty-mouthed, samurai-skilled, ten-year-old female characters of all-time: Moretz’s soon-to-become-iconic Hit-Girl who, post-drug dealer decapitation declares (in the finest form of underage swearing probably ever recorded to celluloid) “Okay you c****, let’s see what you can do now!"

Put simply, what Vaughn (and, to be fair, co-adaptor Jane Goldman) has managed to do is transpose Millar and Romita Jr.’s recognisable-yet-fresh superhero story certainly almost flawlessly in terms of tone, ambition, audacity and sheer bloody-single-mindedness for what they want the story to be, do and say (detractors be damned) if not, at times, seemingly almost entirely faithfully recreating panels-as-shots just as Robert Rodriguez and Zach Snyder previously have paved the way before (in Sin City and 300 respectively). Which, it must be said, is an absolute wonder in this modern, suit-controlled movie-making age, especially after the (moderately) commercial and critical failure of similarly-stand apart supe-tale Watchmen induced fear of no-more creativity and risk-taking.

Almost flawlessly that is though, all bar a slightly boy-gets-girl, etc generic second half turn for the worse in this silver screen version that eschews the comic’s continued skewed tone for something somewhat more mainstream. Whether that’s because they began script-writing only on an outline from Millar before he’d had the chance to finalise the exact outstanding absurd machinations of the on-paper tale or whether its because they didn’t feel his dramatics worked well enough for the silver screen I don’t know? What I do know is that you may cry nit-picking or crow you can’t compare completely different formats (and you’d be entitled to), but I preferred the way the comic did it anyway. That said everything about the film’s revised plot beats work, especially the internet torture sequence and the crowd-pleasingly, dramatically last-ditch, jet-pack pop-up, gatling-gun assisted, Kick-Ass save of Hit-Girl.

Ah, Hit-Girl. How much will the movie-geek community love thee? Let me not try to gauge. ‘Cos she’s the breakout character from 2010, no doubt, no contest despite only being three months into the year and Moretz’s fearless performance as (real name “bleeped-out”) is something unique and special indeed. Best way to describe her? Dakota Fanning meets La Femme Nikita. Or perhaps The Bride. Or perhaps River Tam. Or perhaps all of them rolled up into one dynamite little dangerous package.

Of course she’s the stand-out, I mean how couldn’t she be? But you can’t forget/overlook the return of one Nicolas “Jor-El” Coppola-Cage. What a delight it is to see him having some fun again, unleashing his inner cage and (over)acting as he was born to in a wonderfully-barmy take on Adam West’s staccato-speaking “other, more famous” Caped Crusader. Seriously, every time he’s on screen the film quality jumps a few notches and you will undoubtedly sit up straighter, pay more attention and grin like the Cheshire Cat.

All things considered, Kick-Ass is just a small sword-swipe away from superior five-star status and therefore an official top three placing in jamescarrollreviews notoriously-transitory “finest comic book films of all-time list”. Oh well, have to settle for top five placement instead (sorry Hulk, don’t want to make you angry...).

(strong) ****