The film opens with a short prologue in which an unnamed Armenian mental patient, decked out in full superhero regalia and believing he can fly with the tiny wings strapped to his back, takes a swan dive off a skyscraper, promptly liquefying as he slams into a taxi below. This brief moment, though played mostly for laughs, firmly grounds Kick-Ass in the real world where anyone crazy enough to dress up in neon spandex and fight crime is destined to end up in the hospital or the morgue. It’s a bracing shot of realism in a genre that all too often bends the laws of physics to make the impossible possible for the sake of wish fulfillment. And it’s one of the best moments of the film.
From there the movie backs up a few months to introduce Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a gawky high schooler who wonders why no one’s ever tried the superhero thing for real. Dave buys a green scuba suit and sets out to do some good. But his first attempt to thwart a robbery ends with a knife to the gut and a dozen or so broken bones.
Eventually, after spending a couple months recuperating, Dave gives it another go. Now armed with a couple batons and a taser, Dave, or Kick-Ass as he’s dubbed his alter ego, manages to fight off a couple drug dealers. When the footage of this melee ends up on YouTube, Kick-Ass becomes an instant sensation (and eventually inspires the poor Armenian guy in the opening).
Dave’s story up to this point has been a fun and rather clever send up of many of the superhero genre’s most common characteristics, with riffs on the daddy issues and personal tragedies that so often inspire our four-color heroes. And there’s a gritty realism to the way Kick-Ass’s heroics (which really aren’t all that impressive when you get right down to it) are depicted. His fights are not the acrobatic martial arts ballets of Spider-Man or Blade. Nor is there any evidence of the techno fetish fisticuffs of Iron Man or the Batman films. The combatants in Kick-Ass are just a bunch of normal guys clumsily whaling on each other. It’s clever and compelling and makes it crystal clear just how insane the notion of dressing up in spandex and fighting crime really is.
Unfortunately, Dave’s isn’t the only story in Kick-Ass. There’s also the parallel story of Hit Girl (a wonderfully potty-mouthed Chloë Grace Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, channeling Adam West), a father-daughter superhero team whose backstory indulges in every lame cliché Dave’s story earlier ridiculed. You see, Big Daddy used to be a cop until he was set up by a crooked mobster and sent to prison. While there his pregnant wife committed suicide. But the baby inside her survived, and once Big Daddy got out of prison he began training his young daughter in all manner of martial arts in preparation for their ultimate assault on the mobster that Ruined Their Lives(TM).
The first time the film shows us Hit Girl and Big Daddy in action is when, through a rather convenient confluence of events, they and Kick-Ass end up at the same drug dealer’s apartment. But unlike Kick-Ass, who mostly gets the crap kicked out of him, Hit Girl and Big Daddy absolutely wreck shit, taking out the dealers in an orgy of blood set to a power pop soundtrack.
On its face, the scene is rather fun and, along with a couple other similar sequences later in the film, guarantees that the incredibly bad-ass and extremely foul-mouthed Hit Girl will be a fixture of popular culture for years to come. But this scene also undercuts everything the film had been trying to say with Dave’s story. Hit Girl, a tiny eleven-year-old, manages to demolish a group of grown men with the laser precision and wonky physics this film had early been critiquing. Nothing that Hit Girl does here or later in the film resembles anything like reality. It’s as if director Matthew Vaughn flipped a switch and the film suddenly morphed into the sort of comic book movie it had been ridiculing only minutes before.
Yet even with all that, the film still might have worked had Vaughn confined Kick-Ass to one story and Hit Girl and Big Daddy to another. But of course Kick-Ass eventually has to find the true superhero within and come to Hit Girl’s rescue wearing a jetpack with a pair of gatling guns strapped to it (thereby indulging in the technology fetish also endemic to the superhero genre). And suddenly, unlike his earlier action scenes, Kick-Ass no longer exists in anything like the real world. He turns into a bazooka-wielding bad-ass and blows the big bad mobster away. Any trace of the clever, subtle satire of the first half of the movie completely disappears so that the film can end in the same tired, clichéd way that countless of other superhero films before it have ended.
And yet, even though this incredibly disappointing climax reveals Kick-Ass to be a muddle of inconsistent themes and tones, it’s still kinda enjoyable (except for maybe the bazooka bit). Watching Hit Girl manipulate and then utterly destroy a bunch of gangsters while Ennio Morricone’s legendary theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly unspools on the soundtrack is a helluva lot of fun. The film’s many similar pop culture mash-ups (a shoot-out in the dark filmed in first person through night vision goggles as if it were Halo 3, for instance) are the sort of pure cinematic joygasms rarely seen outside of Tarantino. (And for my money, every action scene here bests anything in either Kill Bill film.)
Kick-Ass features half a dozen such sequences, so crowd-pleasingly, fist-pumpingly fun that it’s a shame Vaughn and Co. couldn’t figure out a way to keep the subtext straight. Without that the film ends up being too contradictory to be anything but the light popcorn flick it set out to tweak. Thus Kick-Ass ends up being something of a miss. But I have to say it’s probably the most enjoyable miss you’re likely to see this year.
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