I grew up, like every other snot-nosed kid, wanting to be a
super-hero. My father spoon-fed me action flicks and
Spider-Man comics from the age of six on, and I spent each
and every weekend/afternoon/spare hour in my backyard
throwing punches and "web-swinging" my way across the skies.
As a pre-pubescent munchkin the idea of stitching up some
spandex and heading out on to the mean streets to ambush
some bank robbers seemed not only entirely realistic, but
downright fun. Only as I've gotten older have the concepts
of danger and bodily harm slowly infiltrated my
spandex-wrapped dreams, slowly deflating my three-colored
newsprint balloon.
Review - Kick-Ass
It is this fantasy, this hope that will draw legions of fans
this weekend to see Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of Mark
Millar's hyper-violent comic book Kick-Ass. Dave
Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your typical high school
middle-grounder. He's got a few friends, he loves comic
books, he covets a certain untouchable member of the
opposite sex (Lyndsy Fonseca) - he squeaks on by somewhere
between invisible and present. Addicted to comic books,
young Lizewski decides one day, after repeatedly being
robbed, to throw on a bright green marine wetsuit and take
on the persona of Kick-Ass, a vigilante crime fighter out to
clean up the city. And surprisingly, he's not the only one.
I went in to Kick-Ass thinking that I was going to
see a realistic take on the concept of super-hero
vigilantism. And to some degree, I did. The first time
Kick-Ass attempts to lay down the law on a duo of
pimple-faced punks, the resulting consequences are
stomach-turning, with Kick-Ass left a bloody, broken mess.
But, of course, Kick-Ass recovers, and where I thought the
film would focus on a similar sort of realistic foray in to
costumed crime-fighting, I instead found myself watching a
very well done, but standard bit of superhero origin story.
All the peaks and valleys are there - the first fall, the
comeback, the arch-nemesis, the girl, the cliffhanger - and
for a film about the realist take on superheroes, well, I
found it a little disappointing. You would imagine that if
a 16-year old kid threw on a wetsuit and started taking out
goons, it would stray, drastically, from the stories this
same 16 year old grew up on. And in Vaughn's take on Kick-Ass,
it doesn't.
That said Vaughn in his role as producer and director has
been a sort of puppet-master of violence, and he injects
this hyper-realized sense of bloody action in to Kick-Ass.
The fight scenes in the film are, well, revelatory. The
sort of high-octane, choreographer death-dances that made a
film like The Matrix scream in to the annals of pop history.
Made even more so by the presence of already fan favorite
Hit Girl (Chloe Moritz), an eleven year old whirling dervish
of carnage that steals the film out from under each and
every character. Especially, and sadly, the character of
Dave Lizewski (admirably filled with squeaky-voiced teen
angst by up-and-comer Aaron Johnson) is almost a no-show.
Yes, he's the narrator and avatar in which we the audience
can enter the world of Kick-Ass, but on the other hand he is
a glorified punching bag. A scared kid who barely shows up
as a super-hero, blindly and barely doing a thing.
Perhaps this is just what Vaughn is trying to say with Kick-Ass:
my 6-year old dreams of costumed crime-fighters are just
that, dreams. There's no way to put a realistic take on
being a super-hero on screen, because hell, it just isn't
realistic.
Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The
Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and
the KEXP blog. He also has his own
Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.
If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his
writings here at Side One: Track One then please do
so
here.
- Noah Sanders
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