Smart Satire or Generic Genre Picture?

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2010)

"Kick-Ass" sets out to lay waste to the archetypal superhero movie, but some see the film as just another addition to the superhero genre. Those who argue for satire point to the first half of the film, where Aaron Johnson's "everyman" character learns the hard way that becoming a superhero isn't as easy as it looks in movies like "Spider-Man" or "Batman Begins." You see, Kick-Ass earns a reputation as a superhero, but he lacks the skills of the more covert Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, who lurk in the shadows with high-grade weaponry and martial arts mastery. While Hit-Girl and Big Daddy fight crime, Kick Ass must deal with the everyday plagues of the American teen. In a funny bit, Kick Ass' alter ego, Dave Lizewski, learns that the "love of his life" wants him to be...well I won't spoil it, but I will say that it stands in the way of Dave's dreams for a little while.
Bits like that one enrich the first half of Kick Ass with a dose of funny reality. Kick Ass comes off as kind of a loser, Hit-Girl looks way too young to be saying the things she says (and doing the things she does), and Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy stands as one of his funniest creations. He's like an overbearing Little League parent on steroids. Less funny are the villains. Mark Strong, an excellent actor, must play a fairly bland crime kingpin. He does his best to enliven his character's dialogue, but he still comes across as a cross between "Daredevil's" Kingpin and "Iron Man's" Obadiah Stane. This composite villain has an equally bland son, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse as a dull redux of McLovin. Still, in the first half of the film, these characters only slightly distract from the bold comedy surrounding the protagonists. Unfortunately, as Jackson Browne once sang, "all god things must come to an end."
The good things in "Kick-Ass" come to an end when the story begins to embrace the formula it's supposed to be tearing apart. Director Matthew Vaughn abandons humor almost entirely as the film claws its way to a gun-crazy climax. There's nothing funny about a scene in which gangsters kidnap and plan to televise the execution of good, if misguided, characters. Vaughn seems eager to comment on his audience's potentially disturbing fascination with violence. This is clear in the film's first half when Kick-Ass enters a fight with high hopes, only to suffer real consequences. It's similarly clear early in the film, when Hit-Girl dispatches some baddies in gruesome and methodical fashion. Towards the end of the film, however, Vaughn seems to fall into the very trap on which he sought to comment.
The encounters toward the end of the film drip with violence, but it's all very stylized. In order to grip the audience, Vaughn employs a type of violence that allows viewers o revel and cheer. This type of violence dominates most genre superhero films (just look t "Iron Man's" robotic smack-down, or at "The Incredible Hulk's" creature clash), so I would never expect it from a supposed "satire" of those films. Generic plot convention after generic plot convention, standard fight scene after standard fight scene, and ridiculous dialogue piece after ridiculous dialogue piece made the second half of Kick-Ass a huge disappointment That said, most of the action is well-shot, the pace still moved along well, and the film's ending has a certain charm to it.
"Kick-Ass" was not the film that it could have been. It starts off satirizing genre superhero movies, but it ends up becoming one. Still, the film works well on the whole. It has an exciting visual style, a number of cackle-worthy comedic bits, and some great hammy performances. It doesn't totally kick ass, but it just might kick butt.