Kick Ass (2010)

Lionsgate

R1 DVD

Kick Ass is one of the strangest and most truly outrageous superhero films I have ever seen. Combining a story of teen angst, comic book heroes and the very dark world of crime it moves between comedy, crime and horror in a way that its it very hard to pigeonhole. This is certainly a cross genre cult film and will make its home among classic cult films.

Director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman have adapted the comic-book series by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr to create something which is quite unique. It is unashamedly violent, gore ridden and confronting yet also amusing and at times anarchic and surreal.

Kick-Ass is a sad teen boy whose life is not what he wants. Dave likes comic books, has nerdy friends and has no success with girls. He decides his best chance is to turn himself into a superhero and hence orders a scuba suit via mail order. His first attempt at super-hero work does not go especially well, he is beaten, stabbed and hit by a car ! After this he takes to training, which seems more like fantasizing, and his dream doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

This all changes when one day he decides to confront a drug dealer who is annoying a girl he likes. Just as he is about to get his ass kicked once again after tasering the guy in the head Hit Girl appears. She looks about eleven, has purple hair and lots of weapons. To the tune of Banana Splits she slaughters the lot of them ! This is a superhero that has no qualms about killing the enemy. We soon learn she is the kid of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), a batman like superhero who has trained her since birth. Earlier scenes as he shoots her in the chest while she is wearing a bullet proof vest are decidedly bizarre. Big Daddy was driven off the police force and into prison on a trumped up drug charge and is now a vigilante working to destroy the organized crime gang behind his demise.

The story gets weirder as weirder as Big Daddy and Hit Girl work their way through the organized crime gang killing with abandon. As the violence increases you get the feeling you are in some sort of surreal nightmare. It is certainly a controversial portrayal of childhood to have a young girl working as a trained assassin. Many have taken terrible offence to this portrayal of child violence (even though comic book in style) and all sorts of “family values” campaigners have crawled out of their holes demanding it be damned.

When the crime lord starts losing more and more of his business and his men, his dorky son gets in on the game appearing as a new superhero Red Mist. Of course this is all a front to entrap those who are after his father and the showdown is bloody and confronting. Big Daddy and Kick-Ass are beaten to a pulp and finally Big Daddy burnt to a cinder, all steamed live to the internet like a snuff feed, Hit Girl appears in the nick of time to save Kick Ass but cannot save Big Daddy. It is now up to Kick Ass and Hit Girl to finish the job !

This is a movie which will thrill and confound in equal amounts. At times the teen humour seems just too dorky to be entertaining and yet at others the sheer brutality of the violence makes you turn away. The fact that much of the violence is committed by an eleven year old girl and would be more at home in Kill Bill or Battle Royale makes it even disconcerting.

Kick Ass is so cross genre that you find it hard to know what you are watching and at times I think it gets somewhat lost and doesn’t really know what it is. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed it; I am just not sure exactly what I was watching. For many cinema goers it is important to be able to develop a certainly emotional affinity for a film, to feel they know where it is at and it is hard to do this with Kick Ass since it swerves through all manner of genres and never seems to settle done in one mood. You can be laughing one minute and then be confronting with a scene of extreme dark violence the next, you have a series of teen coming age of scenes interposed with comic book comedy. It is hard to decipher Kick Ass, however, it is fair to say as a work of cinema, it is a very wild ride.

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