“Kick-Ass” Review: Violent Comedy Blows Its Own Brains Out

At one point in “Kick-Ass,” during a scene in which the titular superhero is getting beaten to a bloody pulp by the bad guys, his first-person voiceover narration taunts skeptical audience members who assume that the narration itself is a sure sign that he will survive.  “Did you not watch ‘Sin City’?” he asks.  “‘Sunset Boulevard’?  ‘American Beauty’?”  It’s an amusing moment, and it encapsulates the cheeky, satirical attitude that enlivens the movie’s best scenes.  On the other hand, the fact that those skeptical audience members (myself included) turn out to be right just goes to show how numbingly predictable and cliched “Kick-Ass” (based on a comic by popular writer Mark Millar) eventually allows itself to become.

Things start out promisingly. Our hero, played by Aaron Johnson and known in his everyday life as Dave Lizewski, is an average high school student with average high school problems: His dream girl doesn’t notice him, nobody respects him, etc.  After getting mugged while a bystander looks on and does nothing, Dave decides that there’s no reason why regular people can’t become superheroes, and sets out to remake himself as a costumed avenger.  For a while the film successfully draws satirical energy from the contrast between Dave’s high-flying aspirations and the brutally demeaning details of his everyday life, such as his masturbation habit and the grotesquely abrupt death of his mother.  Johnson works perfectly in the role; he’s unkempt enough to be believable as a comic book geek with low self-esteem, but simultaneously charming and appealing enough to make us want to root for him.

The problem is that if you’re playing fantasy off against reality, you have to keep a balance between the two, and “Kick-Ass” abandons reality after an hour or so.  Actually, I shouldn’t say “abandons”; really, the movie stabs, bludgeons and eviscerates reality before splattering reality’s brains out against the wall.

Much of this violence, metaphorical and otherwise, is perpetrated by Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), a father-daughter superhero pair that teams up with Kick-Ass.  Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old who sprays bullets, punches and obscenities, is one of the film’s most publicized creations, both in the official marketing campaign and in the complaints of those who find the movie offensive.  Moral objections aside (as though the target audience here would care about those anyway), she does provide some sublime shock-value moments, but there’s nothing else to her character; she’s a one-note gag with no coherent personality.  Big Daddy is actually more entertaining, if only because of Cage’s hilariously off-kilter performance.

The major non-superhero characters aren’t much better.  I think the main villain, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), is a mob kingpin because mob kingpins are supposed to be more realistic than, say, mad scientists, but D’Amico just seems like a bland imitation of the gangsters from “Goodfellas” or “The Sopranos.”  And if you thought that having an 11-year-old girl use superhuman martial arts skills to mow down armies of generic Mafia henchmen was unrealistic, meet Dave’s love interest, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca): She’s pretty, popular, nice, and hey, she loves comic books!  Screenwriters who pander this hard to the male nerd audience deserve to get their WGA memberships revoked.

So Kick-Ass, Big Daddy and Hit-Girl go to war against D’Amico and his thugs (as well as his wannabe-superhero son, played by “Superbad”‘s Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and the story degenerates into a swirling blur of hyper action scenes.  Director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) tries to keep things interesting by throwing in every stylistic trick he can get his hands on–hip soundtrack selections, a bright color palette, a comic-style expositional interlude, and a scene lit solely by strobe lights.  It’s all diverting and eye-catching, and there are some decent laughs all the way through, including a bazooka-based running gag that would earn Chekhov’s approval.  Still, none of these things can quite distract from the absence of an interesting story or multi-dimensional characters.

To those who will tell me that I’m taking “Kick-Ass” too seriously, and that I need to just “turn off my brain”: Believe me, I tried.  I really did, but even over-the-top gore gets boring to me eventually if it doesn’t mean anything.  Besides, if you think I’m the one taking this material too seriously, listen to the dramatic, earnest music that accompanies every major plot point.  Sometimes it seems like the filmmakers actually expect us to take this story seriously, and that might be the funniest thing of all.