05/25/10 - Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass (2010, 117 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1250777/

This was a film I'd really wanted to see for a while so I was happy to give it a go now. I'd heard really mixed reviews but I was still going in with high hopes.

The film stars Aaron Johnson as Dave Lizewski who takes on the persona of Kick-Ass as he fights crime in New York City. Really he's just a kid that wants to be a superhero. There ends up being a twisting storyline with two separate plots. The first revolves around Dave's friends: Marty (Clark Duke) and Todd (Evan Peters) and the girl that Dave likes named Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca). The second revolves around the exciting life of Kick-Ass: fellow school kid Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who takes on the role of Red Mist; his dad who turns into the antagonist of the film, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong); and other "superheroes" Mindy Macready (Chloe Moretz) as Hit-Girl and Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) as Big Daddy.

From the summary above the plot might appear a little too complicated for a fun comic book movie. As it turns out it's extremely simple and still maintains the fun quality it's going for from the beginning. I had read (but cannot confirm) that the guy that wrote the Kick-Ass graphic novel originally wrote it with the intent that it become a movie. In my opinion they translated over really well but I am obviously not aware of the changes made from graphic novel to movie. Anyway, my point in all this is that the movie flows really well and has no pacing issues whatsoever.

The next great thing about the film is that it really is over-the-top fun. It's meant to be zany and crazy and it works perfectly. It's like Kill Bill meets Watchmen or something: it has all the ultraviolence of Kill Bill and the atmosphere of Watchmen. The Kill Bill reference is easy to get. What I mean when I say it's like the atmosphere of Watchmen is the following: the film is clearly tied in some sort of reality. This isn't Spider-Man where a guy gets bit with a spider and gets super powers but it's not The Dark Knight either where everything tries to be realistic but is still somewhat absurd. What happens here is that it's just this really good blend of realism and absurdism. No one completely breaks the laws of physics but when they're bent they're bent for the sake of good fun. Because of this, I'm fine with these little things happen because it makes the action more enjoyable. I guess it's also reminiscent of Shoot 'Em Up in this regard: when it comes time for action it's frequently unbelievable but the fun makes you just not care. It takes itself just seriously enough to be thoroughly enjoyable.

The characters are really fun in this movie as well. I feel Hit-Girl is most memorable just because of the incessant cursing conflicted with her age. Also, Big Daddy is really well done and Cage does just a fantastic job here. The other character worth noting is the bad guy: Frank D'Amico is head of a lumber company (which I guess is a front to his drug business or something). Anyway, I found the lumber company thing just really funny since it's so atypical of a bad guy.

Finally, the music in Kick-Ass is really well done. It constantly teases you with this feeling of "Hey! Look how inspiring this scene is!" which I really found to be mocking itself. Kick-Ass knows (as I said above) that it's not the greatest movie ever made and that it's instead trying to be as fun as can be. One way to do that is to play over-enthusiastic music all the time. It ends up making these scenes hilarious to me. The best use of this was during one Big Daddy fight. Not only was the fight all in one long take (which was really cool in and of itself) but the music was probably the best at this point.

Overall, I gave this film an 8/10. Really it's about on par with Watchmen to me, but for obviously different reasons. Thus they get the same score.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of Kick-Ass to a 7/10.]