Henry Saw: Kick-Ass

A few great scenes...but this is a disappointment


Kick-Ass, the new film by Matthew Vaughn and the first comic book movie of the "summer", poses the question of what would happen if a teenager tried to be a superhero in the real world. The comic on which its based, which was written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita Jr., is an attempt to update the comic book hero story for the 21st century. If Superman is a superhero who pretends to be a nerd, then Dave Lizewski (Kick-Ass) is a nerd who pretends to be a superhero.

The movie follows the book's plot fairly closely. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your typical comic-book-loving geek growing up in New York City. His only power, he tells us, is "being invisible to girls." One day, while hanging out with his friends in the comic shop, he asks why no one has ever tried to be a superhero before. Inspired, Dave decides to order a wet suit off the internet and try to become a real life vigilante. It doesn't go well. He gets stabbed and run over in his first attempt to fight crime, but he refuses to quit. After lenghty rehab, he successfully saves someone outside a diner and, dubbing himself Kick-Ass, becomes an internet sensation.

Kick-Ass encounters another pair of superheroes: Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), an 11 year old who is an expert in taking out bad guys in brutal ways, and her father Big Daddy (Nick Cage) who has trained his daughter to be a killing machine. A mob outfit, led by Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), is soon after all costumed heroes, including Kick-Ass, and Dave must figure out how he is going to handle these "real" heroes he meets, the "bad guys" who are after him, and the girl he has a crush on in school...



Let's start with the biggest (and perhaps only) reason to see Kick-Ass: Chloe Moretz. Pretty much every scene with Hit-Girl is outstanding and Moretz completely steals the film. Her delivery of some very harsh and difficult lines are note perfect. She never seems silly which is quite a feat. Her fighting abilities defy logic, but it still works, and her action sequences are my favorite since Taken. I can't overstate how kinetic and well choreographed her fight scenes are or how good Moretz is in the role. Moretz brings much needed humor and energy to an otherwise disjointed film. Moretz is good enough to give me some hope (not much) that the American remake of Let the Right One In won't be a crime against nature...and that's saying something.

The rest of the cast makes very little impact. Aaron Johnson is a complete non-entity, which sort of suits the role, but he's not charismatic enough to carry most of the movie. Nick Cage...I just can't watch him on screen anymore. He attempts a Adam West parody that was just grating. Also disappointing was how much time we spend with Mark Strong and Christopher Mintz-Plasse who plays Frank D'Amico's comic-obsessed son. None of their scenes are menacing, or funny, or serve any narrative purpose. The only stand-out scene involving Mark Strong is when he gets into a fist fight with, surprise surprise, Hit-Girl. It's the most shocking moment in a film that really tries to push the envelope to little success and you have to give Strong credit for being willing to punch a little girl on screen.

Vaughn fails to keep things interesting for long stretches (i.e. any scene without Hit-Girl after the 20 minute mark). There's a horrible sub-plot where Dave pretends to be gay so he can hang out with the girl he likes. It's cringe-inducing, produces only one small laugh, and takes up a surprising amount of run-time. Another problem the movie has is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts as if its going to be a true parody of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies and other superhero films. Dave lives in a house just like Peter Parker's, we get shots and line readings that echo those Spider-Man films directly, plus references to The Dark Knight, Richard Donner's Superman movies and many others. For some reason, it seems that at a certain point Matthew Vaughn decided he wanted to make a real superhero movie and not a send-up. By the time Dave is using a *SPOILER* jet-pack *SPOILER* Vaughn has completely given up trying to ground the film in reality and has made just another superhero film. It's a big mistake on Vaughn's part. The tone of the film ends up being incredibly jarring and all over the place.



Vaughn is creative in his choice of music but doesn't always make the best decisions. Playing the Banana Splits song while Hit-Girl takes out a room of thugs is fantastic; it brought a big smile to my face. Using the score from 28 Days Later when Big Daddy takes out a room of thugs is...distracting. It felt like something they used as a temporary score for screenings that they then managed to get the rights to. In short, the music is very hit or miss, with the use of Gnarls Barkley being a big miss.

So what do I think of Kick-Ass on the whole? Despite how entertaining I think the Hit-Girl scenes are, and how strong I think Moretz's overall performance is, it is not a film I can recommend. Too much of the film falls flat and never finds the right balance of humor and action. It's a movie I will own, just because I'll want to revisit and share all the Hit-Girl action sequences, but I'll definitely be skipping over everything else. And until the film is out on DVD...so should you.

Grade: C

Best Scene: Hit-Girl's first big action scene...