Kick-Ass Review: Gratuitous, Ridiculous, Anarchic, Repulsive…And A Hell of a Lot of Fun

You can like it or revile it, find it delightful or sickly horrifying, that’s for sure. But what you can’t do is argue that—in a movie-going climate saturated by superheroes and comic book film sagas—Kick-Ass is not an original piece of entertainment. From beginning to end, it’s over-the-top, gratuitous, profane, zany, and thoroughly outrageous—and it knows it. Independently financed by director Matthew Vaughn and released by Lionsgate—quickly establishing itself as the studio that will release what all other studios won’t—Kick-Ass has carte blanche and it milks that status for all that it’s worth.

Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., Kick-Ass tells the satirical tale of high schooler Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), an average teen who decides to become a superhero after he and his friend are mugged while a bystander watches and does nothing. Besides working as a commentary on apathy, this sequence works as the perfect setup for the story. Dave purchases a ridiculous scuba suit and goes out on the prowl, even though he has no superpowers or fighting skills of any kind. In other words, he’s doomed to fail. And he does. He gets beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car—driven by the same apathetic bystander.

The benefit of his hospitalization: nerve damage makes him more immune to pain. So Dave goes out for round two, and this time, he gets the job done. Taking on three men in a gang fight, his actions are recorded on someone’s cell phone camera. And in another enjoyable commentary on the absurdity of the digital age, Dave—as the crime-fighter Kick-Ass becomes an internet sensation. He sets up a MySpace account so that the citizenry can contact Kick-Ass and ask him for help.

With his newly-cemented superhero status, Dave is eager to help his dream girl, who has admitted to him that she is being harassed by a drug dealer. He dons his cape and cowl—er, ah, scuba suit—and investigates the situation first hand. He ends up in an evil layer full of baddies out to destroy him. In the nick of time (ain’t that always the way?), Dave gets rescued by Hit-Girl, another costumed youngling who wields a double-bladed staff.

The movie may be called Kick-Ass, but Hit-Girl—and Chloe Moretz, the young actress who plays her—is unquestionably the highlight of the movie. When Luc Besson made Leon (a.k.a. The Professional in the U.S.), in the mid-nineties, there was a fair amount of controversy surrounding Natalie Portman‘s young would-be killer Mathilda. Hit-Girl–how she talks and how she fights–makes Mathilda look like Barbie. Hit-Girl has been trained by her father, alias Big Daddy—a former cop who was framed and imprisoned and lost his pregnant wife. The culprit? Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong, who also plays villains in Sherlock Holmes and Ridley Scott’s upcoming take on Robin Hood), head honcho of a local crime syndicate.

Big Daddy is played by Nicolas Cage in an example of perfect casting. Cage, a comic nut in real life, brings his inimitable, looney personality to an inimitable, looney role. At times he seems to channel both Adam West and Elvis. Cage often receives a lot of flak from critics and moviegoers alike (a lot of it undeserved), but trust me, he’s perfect here. With this and Bad Lieutenant, this is a really strong time for him right now.

When Kick-Ass, Hit Girl and Big Daddy realize that they’re after the same guy, they team up to take him down. The other main character in the movie is D’Amico’s son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who assumes a costumed persona of his own and proceeds to gum up the works.

The action is plentiful and uniformly ridiculous. Every moment you would expect to be over-the-top absolutely is, and then some. Anyone who has seen any of Vaughn’s movies knows that he has been unmistakably influenced by postmodern, hyperstylized, showy filmmakers like Tarantino and Guy Ritchie—neither of which I particularly enjoy (I know, so stone me already). But it all worked for me here, because the premise is so ridiculous, frankly I don’t think you could have made this movie any other way than they way in which they did.

It’s a canny concoction of glossy mayhem, odd poignancy, incredible vulgarity and electric pulp. It’s exactly the kind of thing all but guaranteed to make the majority of my generation dance with glee. Kick-Ass is basically a textbook example of how to make a pop culture phenomenon. I don’t know if the movie will actually achieve that status and keep it for any real length of time, but I admired the effort. Cage and Moretz really nailed it for me. In some ways I wish the movie had only been about them. But overall it works, and Kick-Ass certainly stands to be maybe the wildest movie experience offered this year. I’m holding out for Inception and The Expendables though.