Too much 'bang' and 'slash', too little 'kerpow'

Rating: 5/10 (23 January 2014)

The classic premise of many superhero movies is that an ordinary, even a wimpy sort of guy, has a second life thanks to his secret powers: think Spiderman, Superman or Batman. So the hilarious premise of 'Kick-Ass' is that a really ordinary guy decides to live a second life as a superhero, but without any super powers, and with predictably mixed results. And in places the film is funny. But a general feature of superhero movies is that the violence they feature is comic-book stuff, which enables the crime fighting vigilante to indeed be a hero, and not the altogether more ambiguous figure found, for example, in Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver'. 'Kick-Ass', unfortunately, combines its comic presence with a lot of serious violence. It's deliberately overdone as opposed to realistic, but nonetheless, it still falls into a long family of movies that seem to tell us that ultra-violence is cool. Some people can pull this off through sheer verve (think Tarantino at his best), but generally, I find the fetishising of guns and swordplay tedious, and to me, this blunts the movie's comic edge. To me, 'Kick-Ass' was less than the sum of its parts; maybe I have no sense of humour, but bazookas don't make me laugh.