Like its protagonist, “Kick-Ass” suffers from an identity crisis.
When Kick-Ass the comic was first released, I was impressed by how far the writer, Mark Millar, was willing to take his characters. However, as the story moved on, the body count grew higher and higher, and the scenes bloodier and bloodier to no good end except that Millar could do it that way. His property. His choices. No problem with that, except it didn’t make for good reading after an issue or two. However, sitting in a theatre watching an 11-year-old girl, supposedly living in the real world, pull off these amazingly choreographed kills was nothing but fun. And pretty much weightless. The concern I felt for all the heroes in Kick-Ass the comic, wasn’t present in Kick-Ass the movie at all. While I fretted over Dave’s choices and Hit Girl’s salty vocabulary and sociopathic upbringing in the reading, I never felt that there was any damage being done to their psyche’s in the film.
And this is the schizophrenia of Kick-Ass: it’s a terrible read with gem-like commentary and a featherweight movie that doesn’t even stand up to Titus Andronchus for character violence. Or for more modern watchers, it doesn’t even stand up to Die Hard 4 for general mayhem.
I will give Kick-Ass and Mark Millar this: I appreciate the wanton escalation and huge payoff at the end because there’s no expectation of continuance. Unlike most comic books which want to preserve a core cast of characters because the buying public identifies with them and wants to buy products in which they appear, and, therefore, must keep these characters alive ad infinitum, Kick-Ass has no upper limit that keeps characters “in play,” as it were, because the characters are not what drive the story, so they are expendable in the face of a rising action that has to keep rising. And I’m torn on liking this or not. On the plus side, it hurries the story along and stakes seems that much more risky. This was a lesson that Jericho learned after being canceled less than a season into the story. I tried to watch when it was on, but after four or so episodes of the town facing one more post-apocalyptic crisis yet settling down to a cold brewski at the end, I gave up. I never felt like these characters were at risk because they weren’t. Keeping a story going for as long as possible, usually past the point of usefulness or interest, is the TV way of telling a story. However, after “Jericho” was canceled, the writers took the story into some radical and life-threatening directions (I caught a clip here and there). Too bad they didn’t do so earlier. I hope that “V” learns the same lesson. Soon. (Related kvetch: the pacing on that show is glacial. And a resistance movement of four people?!? Riiiight.) On the con side, it hurries the story along and characters are sacrificed along the way. Aaron Johnson as Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass was apt: kinda bland and not much of an emotional range, but there wasn’t a lot of call for emotion in “Kick-Ass”. Alone, Johnson couldn’t carry the movie, but he luckily had Chloe Moretz (Hit Girl) to do all the heavy lifting. More than anyone else, she had a story that was worth telling. and Nic Cage… good Lord. He’s almost like Shelly Winters, the butt of his own joke. More than once, I thought he was Nic Cage playing a man who was mocking Nic Cage.
And for comic that was so audacious, I was shocked that Millar signed off on (I assume he signed off on) a Hollywood ending: boy gets girl, boy lays girl, boy uses personal bazooka to dispatch antagonist and usher in the dénouement (not as cool as it sounds). The ending to Kick-Ass the comic was much more coherent, or at least much more in line with the rest of the story. The movie’s seams show so badly that I again found myself wondering if there was an element of parody involved.
While the movie didn’t live up to Mark Millar’s own hype, it’s an adventure worth catching. If it were 3D, I’d tell you to see it now, but it’s 2D, so wait till it’s on DVD.
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