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connielane at 12:50pm on 19/04/2010 under movies
connielane at 12:50pm on 19/04/2010 under moviesOkay, I've written at length about this movie before, shortly after I saw the rough cut at BNAT back in December, so what follows is not a review, but part of the conversation that's happening about the film right now.
First of all, a clip. One that made the rounds right after the BNAT screening and one that I feel sums up the sensibilities of the film pretty well. If you watch the clip below and have a response of "LMAO, that's messed up, but hilarious!" then Kick-Ass is right up your alley. If, on the other hand, your response is more "Um ... dude," then you probably wouldn't dig it. And that's okay, you'd be in excellent company - Roger Ebert hates it, too.
That's Mindy and her daddy Damon, who take on the personas of Hit Girl and Big Daddy, respectively. Damon "Big Daddy" Macready (Nicholas Cage) is a sociopath. Plain and simple. He used to be a cop, but crime boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) used the police in his pocket to put Damon in prison on a made-up drug charge. Damon's pregnant wife is left in dire straits and kills herself, but her baby girl is saved. Mindy "Hit Girl" Macready (Chloe Moretz) stays with Damon's former cop partner Marcus until Damon is released from prison. But prison has changed Damon, and the injustice of his incarceration has driven him to revenge. Having once been a good guy, he now sees the world as a place where it doesn't matter what you do because some asshole can come along and take everything from you. He doesn't want his girl to be a victim in a world like this, so he trains her. He shows her - as seen in the clip above - what it feels like to be shot in the chest while wearing a kevlar vest. He shows her how to use all kinds of weaponry - seriously, they have an arsenal that would make Rambo Granger envious - and for good measure raises her on action movies like the films of John Woo.
Obviously, this is not meant to be realistic. And yet, it kind of is. In a way, the main conflicts in the movie are a result of Hit Girl's and Big Daddy's vigilantism. When Kick-Ass gets in over his head, it's Hit Girl who saves him by doing what he, as the eponymous hero, cannot (either as a character or as the tentative moral needle of the story) - kill every "c*nt" in the room. This was never what Dave signed up for when he decided to be Kick-Ass, and in fact the whole incident of seeing Hit Girl and Big Daddy in action leaves him shaken and crying himself to sleep. Because - DUH, it's totally wrong to kill people.
From here on out, the violence takes a different turn. When Kick-Ass and Red Mist escape the burning lumber warehouse and we see the video footage of Big Daddy's slaughter, it feels different. It's not as fun. The characters are not actually a threat to Kick-Ass (that's D'Amico, who specifically asks them not to touch him until he gets there). And even the music is different - darker, more foreboding. The laughter comes after the video stops and we cut back to D'Amico, Chris, and another guy on the couch, staring in awe.
The next big moment of violence is even less fun. Satisfying yes, but not fun like the "Tra la la" scene. We're seeing Big Daddy and Kick-Ass tied up and tortured - and filmed for streaming internet and television. This is not fun. At all. But it's a logical development from what came before. It's not empirically realistic, but for a world of comic book superheroes, it certainly IS realistic. This isn't a cheesy villain strapping James Bond to an elaborate, easy-to-escape-from device and assuming everything will go to plan. This is Goldfinger capturing Bond and calmly shooting him in the head. Because that's how bad guys roll in the real world. But all is not lost. Hit Girl, who was shot and left for dead (thank goodness Daddy kept her wrapped in kevlar and taught her how to take a bullet like a real woman), arrives to let everyone know (including all the people watching on the internet) what happens when you f*** with her Daddy. Big Daddy, now burning alive, shouts instructions to help her along ("KRYPTONIIIIIITE!"), and she follows them, once again laying waste to everyone in the room and saving Kick-Ass, though too late to save Big Daddy. She and Kick-Ass escape in the Mistmobile, and while Dave is focused on getting her to a safe place and being done with all this nonsense, Hit Girl is set on attending to Big Daddy's unfinished business. She's going, and she's more than capable of putting Dave down if he gets in her way. So all Dave can do at this point is try and help her, which he does.
And now for the big finish, and again the violence is a bit different. Critics have complained that Hit Girl kills without seeming to be affected, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly the idea. Damon says early in the film that his training, what his former partner Marcus calls "brainwashing," he calls "making it a game." It's like a video game for her, and the visual of her taking out the guys who've captured Big Daddy only reinforce that, especially the night-goggle view, which looks exactly like a video game. (Then of course there's the strobe light sequence, which is such a great nod to the panel-by-panel action of comic books.) But this last violent setpiece is quite different. She doesn't have Big Daddy to help her, and it's no longer a game. She now knows what death is, and she wants to deliver it to the guys who are responsible for educating her about it. And the emotional investment is what I think leads to the tiny errors in judgment that cause her to be cornered with no ammo.
Kick-Ass arrives just in time, though, in one of the more spectacular action reveals I've ever seen, accompanied by one of Elvis Presley's most famous moments of musical drama. But there are still two bad guys standing, and while the geeks take each other on, Hit Girl is left to finish off D'Amico. Which she can't do. She makes a hell of an effort, but she is still just eleven years old, and it's time for the movie to show us how young she is and how wrong it is for her to be involved in any of this shit. She wails on D'Amico for a bit, but he finally strikes a blow to her face, knocking her to the ground and producing from her nose a substance she has clearly never seen before - her own blood. It's clearly not a game. I am more than a little offended at the critics who've felt the need to tell me this scene is not funny. DUH. That's why no one in the three audiences I've seen this with has laughed. That's also probably why the movie juxtaposes this fight with one that is ACTUALLY funny - Dave and Chris cluelessly going at each other in the other room - to give us not only something to break the tension but also an obvious contrast to the much more serious fight between Hit Girl and D'Amico.
Yes, it gets ugly. It should. This is the world Damon brought Mindy into, and which he's foolishly tried to prepare her for. But she's not a grown-up, and she can only do so much. D'Amico finally subdues her enough so that he can step away for a second and get his gun, and we see that he bizarrely admires her ("I wish I had a son like you."), but he can't let her live. So he points his gun at her head, and we're ready to jump up and say "OKAY, TIME OUT! SCREW YOU, MOVIE - WE'RE NOT WATCHING THIS!"
And of course, we don't have to. The movie knows us like it's our mommy. We want our superheroes gritty and dark, but we still want them to live in that magical world where they won't get hurt. So Kick-Ass regains consciousness just in time to grab the Bazooka of Ultimate Justice and end D'Amico. Boo-yah. All's right with the world.
The movie made less money than many people expected this weekend, but I do think word-of-mouth will help it along nicely. And it was made independently, pretty much for a niche audience, so success will look different for this film than it would for, say, a Transformers movie. Personally, I'd like it to do well enough that there's a sequel of at least the comic book. The end of the movie pretty much begs for one.
In any case, I find it odd that so many people seem outraged by this movie. It's not as violent as Kill Bill, which most critics loved. And Hit Girl is no more vulgar than the elementary school characters on South Park (in fact, she's nothing to Eric Cartman). And is Hit Girl really that much more appalling than Natalie Portman in The Professional? I submit not. And her situation in that movie is not satirical at all, but meant to be taken seriously. So, while I respect that not everyone has to like this movie, the outrage seems a bit much to me. And it's kind of dickish to imply that there's something wrong with people who do like it.
First of all, a clip. One that made the rounds right after the BNAT screening and one that I feel sums up the sensibilities of the film pretty well. If you watch the clip below and have a response of "LMAO, that's messed up, but hilarious!" then Kick-Ass is right up your alley. If, on the other hand, your response is more "Um ... dude," then you probably wouldn't dig it. And that's okay, you'd be in excellent company - Roger Ebert hates it, too.
That's Mindy and her daddy Damon, who take on the personas of Hit Girl and Big Daddy, respectively. Damon "Big Daddy" Macready (Nicholas Cage) is a sociopath. Plain and simple. He used to be a cop, but crime boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) used the police in his pocket to put Damon in prison on a made-up drug charge. Damon's pregnant wife is left in dire straits and kills herself, but her baby girl is saved. Mindy "Hit Girl" Macready (Chloe Moretz) stays with Damon's former cop partner Marcus until Damon is released from prison. But prison has changed Damon, and the injustice of his incarceration has driven him to revenge. Having once been a good guy, he now sees the world as a place where it doesn't matter what you do because some asshole can come along and take everything from you. He doesn't want his girl to be a victim in a world like this, so he trains her. He shows her - as seen in the clip above - what it feels like to be shot in the chest while wearing a kevlar vest. He shows her how to use all kinds of weaponry - seriously, they have an arsenal that would make Rambo Granger envious - and for good measure raises her on action movies like the films of John Woo.
Obviously, this is not meant to be realistic. And yet, it kind of is. In a way, the main conflicts in the movie are a result of Hit Girl's and Big Daddy's vigilantism. When Kick-Ass gets in over his head, it's Hit Girl who saves him by doing what he, as the eponymous hero, cannot (either as a character or as the tentative moral needle of the story) - kill every "c*nt" in the room. This was never what Dave signed up for when he decided to be Kick-Ass, and in fact the whole incident of seeing Hit Girl and Big Daddy in action leaves him shaken and crying himself to sleep. Because - DUH, it's totally wrong to kill people.
From here on out, the violence takes a different turn. When Kick-Ass and Red Mist escape the burning lumber warehouse and we see the video footage of Big Daddy's slaughter, it feels different. It's not as fun. The characters are not actually a threat to Kick-Ass (that's D'Amico, who specifically asks them not to touch him until he gets there). And even the music is different - darker, more foreboding. The laughter comes after the video stops and we cut back to D'Amico, Chris, and another guy on the couch, staring in awe.
The next big moment of violence is even less fun. Satisfying yes, but not fun like the "Tra la la" scene. We're seeing Big Daddy and Kick-Ass tied up and tortured - and filmed for streaming internet and television. This is not fun. At all. But it's a logical development from what came before. It's not empirically realistic, but for a world of comic book superheroes, it certainly IS realistic. This isn't a cheesy villain strapping James Bond to an elaborate, easy-to-escape-from device and assuming everything will go to plan. This is Goldfinger capturing Bond and calmly shooting him in the head. Because that's how bad guys roll in the real world. But all is not lost. Hit Girl, who was shot and left for dead (thank goodness Daddy kept her wrapped in kevlar and taught her how to take a bullet like a real woman), arrives to let everyone know (including all the people watching on the internet) what happens when you f*** with her Daddy. Big Daddy, now burning alive, shouts instructions to help her along ("KRYPTONIIIIIITE!"), and she follows them, once again laying waste to everyone in the room and saving Kick-Ass, though too late to save Big Daddy. She and Kick-Ass escape in the Mistmobile, and while Dave is focused on getting her to a safe place and being done with all this nonsense, Hit Girl is set on attending to Big Daddy's unfinished business. She's going, and she's more than capable of putting Dave down if he gets in her way. So all Dave can do at this point is try and help her, which he does.
And now for the big finish, and again the violence is a bit different. Critics have complained that Hit Girl kills without seeming to be affected, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly the idea. Damon says early in the film that his training, what his former partner Marcus calls "brainwashing," he calls "making it a game." It's like a video game for her, and the visual of her taking out the guys who've captured Big Daddy only reinforce that, especially the night-goggle view, which looks exactly like a video game. (Then of course there's the strobe light sequence, which is such a great nod to the panel-by-panel action of comic books.) But this last violent setpiece is quite different. She doesn't have Big Daddy to help her, and it's no longer a game. She now knows what death is, and she wants to deliver it to the guys who are responsible for educating her about it. And the emotional investment is what I think leads to the tiny errors in judgment that cause her to be cornered with no ammo.
Kick-Ass arrives just in time, though, in one of the more spectacular action reveals I've ever seen, accompanied by one of Elvis Presley's most famous moments of musical drama. But there are still two bad guys standing, and while the geeks take each other on, Hit Girl is left to finish off D'Amico. Which she can't do. She makes a hell of an effort, but she is still just eleven years old, and it's time for the movie to show us how young she is and how wrong it is for her to be involved in any of this shit. She wails on D'Amico for a bit, but he finally strikes a blow to her face, knocking her to the ground and producing from her nose a substance she has clearly never seen before - her own blood. It's clearly not a game. I am more than a little offended at the critics who've felt the need to tell me this scene is not funny. DUH. That's why no one in the three audiences I've seen this with has laughed. That's also probably why the movie juxtaposes this fight with one that is ACTUALLY funny - Dave and Chris cluelessly going at each other in the other room - to give us not only something to break the tension but also an obvious contrast to the much more serious fight between Hit Girl and D'Amico.
Yes, it gets ugly. It should. This is the world Damon brought Mindy into, and which he's foolishly tried to prepare her for. But she's not a grown-up, and she can only do so much. D'Amico finally subdues her enough so that he can step away for a second and get his gun, and we see that he bizarrely admires her ("I wish I had a son like you."), but he can't let her live. So he points his gun at her head, and we're ready to jump up and say "OKAY, TIME OUT! SCREW YOU, MOVIE - WE'RE NOT WATCHING THIS!"
And of course, we don't have to. The movie knows us like it's our mommy. We want our superheroes gritty and dark, but we still want them to live in that magical world where they won't get hurt. So Kick-Ass regains consciousness just in time to grab the Bazooka of Ultimate Justice and end D'Amico. Boo-yah. All's right with the world.
The movie made less money than many people expected this weekend, but I do think word-of-mouth will help it along nicely. And it was made independently, pretty much for a niche audience, so success will look different for this film than it would for, say, a Transformers movie. Personally, I'd like it to do well enough that there's a sequel of at least the comic book. The end of the movie pretty much begs for one.
In any case, I find it odd that so many people seem outraged by this movie. It's not as violent as Kill Bill, which most critics loved. And Hit Girl is no more vulgar than the elementary school characters on South Park (in fact, she's nothing to Eric Cartman). And is Hit Girl really that much more appalling than Natalie Portman in The Professional? I submit not. And her situation in that movie is not satirical at all, but meant to be taken seriously. So, while I respect that not everyone has to like this movie, the outrage seems a bit much to me. And it's kind of dickish to imply that there's something wrong with people who do like it.
cranky