There be some mild-to-medium heat spoilers in here. Y’all be careful now.

Before seeing Kick-Ass I have to admit, I had quite the disdain for it. The film, like Vaughn’s last film, Stardust, seemed to be victim of failed marketing tactics. It is a tough sell, a kid tries to become a superhero in the real world where people bleed when punched, teams up with other psychotic vigilantes in ultra-violent brawls that mimic A Clockwork Orange not in artistry, but in sadism. The previews gave us hints at the films edge, but between the CGI squibs and the little girl calling everyone cunts, I still didn’t get it. The humour seemed juvenile, the violence pointless. I try to be professional and come into a film with no preconceived feelings towards it, but that’s often impossible, I am only human after all. I could just hope that the film could honestly impress me and justify it’s apparent insanity. And honestly, it did, at first.

But therein lies one of Kick-Ass‘s fundamental faults: it has to justify it’s own existence. It’s a film that relies heavily on it’s shock value and in order to bring balance to itself, it must offer an alternative to the vulgarity, some plot and character, which end up giving the film a sense of over-reaching it’s limitations. The drama takes away from the violence, while the violence takes away from the drama.

Like last years Watchmen, Kick-Ass has a rabid fanbase in the comic community. And according to them, generally speaking, the film did the comic justice. But, like Watchmen, this results in the film feeling bloated from subplots and abrupt changes in tone to newcomers like myself. Thinking of all that Kick-Ass wants to be is a bit ratting: a realistic portrayal of normal superheroes, an allegory for the challenges of adolescence, dissection of parent-child relationships, a superhero satire, and an over-the-top comic book film. All of these things crammed into a single film, many of them contradicting other themes. It ends up in a film that works in segments, and certain aspects compliment each other nicely, but looking at it as a whole, it’s a bloody mess.

My skepticism for the film quickly evaporated during the first half of the film as our hero, Kick-Ass, builds himself a superhero identity using tools you’d expect a kid to use like MySpace and the web. And the scenes where he begins to take to the streets are both hilarious and frightening as the film has still retained it’s semi-realistic roots. Kick-Ass spends his early days trying to find lost kittens and being looked at weird by his fellow man, but this being New York, it’s not too weird. What makes the early part of the film so great is that Kick-Ass, a kid with delusions of grandeur, has no training and constantly gets his own ass kicked. But his balls and unique approach to actually living out a comic fantasy attract millions of fans via YouTube and MySpace. It’s almost unfortuante that the film never views Kick-Ass like the world surely does: as another internet freak whose video is an amusement to stoned kids worldwide who’d likely enjoy seeing him beaten just as much as they enjoy seeing him kick ass. Of course, the film instead opts for the public holding their breathes in anxiety during a time of crisis as if he were Superman himself.

Kick-Ass becomes a geek-icon quickly, despite not really doing anything substantial, and the allure of fame draws him in for further crime fighting. But it’s about at this point when the film realizes there isn’t anywhere else to really go with the amateur hero plot and instead switches gears to introducing Big Daddy and Hit Girl. A tag-team of father-daughter heroes who are somewhere between Son of Sam and Charles Manson on the mentally fucked up scale. Big Daddy has trained his daughter since birth to kill, take bullets, and wish for nothing else besides weapons. There is one brief scene where another characters pleads Big Daddy to give his daughter her childhood back, thankfully, Daddy quickly dismisses this and we’re never bothered with those boring moral implications again. On to the killing!

So Kick-Ass really runs out of plot by the time he becomes an internet sensation. It’s here when he meets up with Big Daddy and Hit-Girl who basically bail Kick-Ass out of every scenario for the rest of the movie. Kick-Ass becomes a character disconnected from the plot about half-way through, he has no importance or bearing on any event, he is merely mistaken for the father-daughter killers and is targeted in order to remain relevant. Or, if you prefer to look at it the other way, Big Daddy and Hit Girl exist merely to drive Kick-Ass’s plot along. The plot involves Big Daddy getting revenge on an evil drug kingpin for ruining his life, and is apparently extremely difficult to kill since they never get around to it, oh, until the end when Hit Girl single-handedly murders her way through his office with ease until confronting him.

Kick-Ass does maintain a separate love plot that often feels shoehorned into the action, and if this is supposed to be a parallel to Spider-Man or channeling adolescent trouble, it fails on both accounts. The plot seemingly runs through the motions where she ignores him, likes him, feels betrayed, then loves him. It all happens so fast it’s meaningless, even the oft-criticized Spider-Man film romance is handled with much more care and affection for it’s characters. And what does Kick-Ass learn from the whole experience as the film concludes? That superheroes are better left to fantasy, because the real world is complicated. Hey, that’s great.

Big Daddy and Hit Girl bring two polar opposite elements to the film that would be lacking without their involvement: insane violence and melodrama. These two things rarely go hand in hand, and they certain do not here. Despite the films earlier insistence that it intends to depict a story exploring the “what if” of a regular person becoming a superhero, these two characters are so far from real they are impossible to sympathize with. Hit Girl in particular leaps and bounds off of walls, reloading in mid-air and just generally defying most laws of physics. Hit Girl acts more as a video game character, and she surely was intended to be such considering one disengaging first-person shooting scene and a finale featuring a character being hit and carried by the rocket from a “bazooka”. Kick-Ass then arrives on a jetpack with shoulder-mounted machine guns. Yet, in an obligatory death scene of one of the heroes, we are asked to feel for these characters and their sacrifice. It is actually difficult to fathom that the film at the end is the same film as the one in the beginning.

Some of this over-the-top violence is supposedly part of the film’s satire. Which is fairly hit-and-miss. There are strong moments when the film really picks away at the cliches of the super-saturated superhero genre particularly the early Kick-Ass scenes where he is openly laughed at by the crooks he’s trying to stop, or when Red Mist arrives with his “Mistmobile” where Vaughn employs some funny techniques mocking the intense Batmobile angled shots from the earlier Batman films. But the other stuff? The supposed satire often appears aimless and sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is supposed to be genuine. Kick-Ass himself is an obvious mash-up of various superheroes, but most obviously Spider-Man. Aaron Johnson would have played a great Peter Parker had he not been Kick-Ass, and he channels it wonderfully in this film. His awkward relationship with the high-school girl of his dreams, his lack of training, the fear of continuing his superhero role, his appearance, and the “no power, no responsibility” speech at the end pretty much define him as the ultimate Spidey knock-off. But where is the satire, specifically? Is it the slapstick window entrance when he reveals himself to his would-be-girlfriend? The outfit? Perhaps the lack of morality in Hit Girl is a stab at the nature of all violent superheroes ever? Ultimately, some of it works, some of it doesn’t. Scream this ain’t.

The film’s ultraviolence and vulgarity has drawn a lot of heat from newcomers, while many comic fans defend the film by saying little kids swear in real life too. Sure, but do they jump off of walls and withstand numerous gunshots? But that violence is just a satirical take on comic book violence right? Well, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, I appreciate the satire on superhero films, but a movie satirizing a comic seems pointless and ineffective. The violence in Kick-Ass did not bother me as much as I expected, it never felt as unnecessary as many critics made it out to be, and never felt as revolting as I was led to believe. That said, I also felt nothing towards the infamous scene where Hit Girl is beaten within an inch of her life. I guess that makes me a pretty sick guy, right? Well, maybe, if it weren’t for the fact that Hit Girl is no more an 11-year-old than any other character in the movie. Her abilities to fly across rooms and call everyone cunts and douches makes her just a shock-value machine. She was the biggest mystery in the film for me. Despite finding her fairly funny due to her nonchalant attitude, I was always confused about whether her age contrasted with her constant weapon wielding was meant to be funny, shocking, or both? I suspect funny because it always just appeared awkward that this little kid was blowing people’s brains out, never really disturbing. But again, that may have to do with the fact she may have looked 11, but she never felt 11. Or human for that matter.

Kick-Ass is filled with these kinds of unanswerable questions, it’s satire is messy which results in a film that occasionally charms and entertains, but more often than not irritates. While comic characters contain several aspects that are translatable to other mediums, their structures are simply not cross-compatible. Many of the elements of Kick-Ass, especially Hit Girl, are things that may have worked wonders on the pages of a comic, but really don’t gel in the constantly moving world of cinema. This film is a sort of reinforcement of why I don’t read many comics, I am more interested in lingering shots of meaning, rather than the comic mediums tendency to dedicate a two-page spread to illustrate someones head exploding in microscopic detail. I can appreciate style, but when style and meaning try to overrule one another, it’s evidence enough that some things should just stay on the paper they were printed on.

GRADE: C

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