Rating: 2 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
When “normal” teenager Dave Lizewski decides to become a superhero, after donning a scuba suit and getting some batons, he immediately gets stabbed and hit by a car. Now with a body full of metal and some dead nerve endings, he has the power of being marginally more durable than he was before, and Kick-Ass takes to the streets to try to clean up the city!
Soon more follow his lead, like Big Daddy, Hit-Girl, and the Red Mist. Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are trying to bring down the D’Amico crime family, while Red Mist is secretly the son of boss Frank D’Amico, and his Red Mist persona is to try to get him in good with the other vigilantes so he can lure them into a trap.
After Red Mist’s betrayal, Big Daddy is killed before Hit-Girl can reach him, but Kick-Ass survives, and soon Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass have a plan to get revenge and take down the D’Amico family once and for all. That plan? Just go to where the mobsters are and hope that Hit-Girl will be better at killing people than they are, and have Kick-Ass show up at the end with a jet-pack with gatling guns attached to it just in case. But they left one person alive, Red Mist, who has decided that the world now needs its first supervillain.
Best Parts:
The action scenes are good, especially those with Hit-Girl. It’s a nice-looking film overall, with fun use of color and costuming. I like the way they used John Romita Jr.’s artwork to tell the backstory of Big Daddy.
The performances are generally good.
Worst Parts:
When the Kick-Ass comic was first announced, I remember Mark Millar going around saying the premise was what would happen in the real world if someone decided to become a costumed vigilante. I probably shouldn’t hold that against the eventual comic or this movie, but this is such a cartoon, with no element of it ever feeling real or genuine. No scene, no character, no emotion, comes across like anything a person would feel or express or an action they would take in these circumstances. This is a superhero movie riffing off the success of stuff like Superbad and even American Pie.
And it does not age well. I’m not here to excoriate art from the past for not being “PC” or whatever, but this is trying so hard to be edgy and “outrageous” and none of it is funny or genuinely shocking. Thank God they kept in the line from one of Dave’s idiot friends about how Paris Hilton is too flat-chested to be hot — oh yeah, believe it, they went there! This isn’t your granddad’s superhero movie! This is a movie that gets bizzay, consistently and thoroughly! Unbelievably, it’s somehow less tryhard and edgy than the comic, with a few of the harsher moments, like Katie rejecting Dave and sending him a pic of her going down on her boyfriend or the reveal that Big Daddy made up the whole story about being a cop and simply kidnapped his daughter and brainwashed her into being Hit-Girl, edited out to give us a slightly happier ending.
I don’t have a problem with Hit-Girl’s ultra-violence or foul mouth — I think she’s the only character in the movie that kind of works — but it’s another example of how fake everything feels. Her father doesn’t seem to swear at all, and has a deliberately old-fashioned suburban dad-lingo thing going on, so giving her the dialogue they do is just another example of meaningless edgelord nonsense.
“How’d you find me, Marcus?”
“One of us is still a cop, remember?”
This is what screenwriter’s write when they have absolutely no idea how Marcus might’ve found him.
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