The Starting Pitcher of Young Guy Movies in 2010

Rating: 8/10 (16 July 2010)

Watching Kick-Ass, we realize other films are working at one quarter speed. We've seen so many superhero movies. Especially after the Dark Knight watershed, Hollywood's as crazed in its search for comic-book options as Dobbs was in his search for gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We feel we're familiar with all the angles on the genre, but then comes this movie, itself a comic book adaptation, about several superheroes, that, very simply, does it better. It's fresh. It doesn't spoof or satirize; it just plays an original tune with all the same notes. It's directed by Matthew Vaughn, who produced Guy Ritchie's hyperkinetic thug films, but directed Layer Cake. So we wonder, who was learning from who? Kick-Ass tells the basic story of the Ordinary Teenager, who wonders why nobody's ever decided to become a superhero like the ones in his comics. The reasons are obvious, but when you're one of those invisible kids in high school, your big pipe dreams begin to be your plot to prove yourself. So he decides to become a real-life superhero himself, despite having no powers or training in the least. The movie does not shy away from realistic ramifications of fantastical encounters, and during his first attempt to fight crime by trying to stop a carjacking by two local thugs, he's indeed beaten, stabbed, and even hit by a car. He's hospitalized, convinces medics to say nothing of his costume, to say he was brought in naked. But now some of his nerve endings are damaged, giving him a slightly enhanced capacity to endure pain, metal plates have been placed in his skeleton to sustain his bones.
The assigned villains of the story are big-city Mafiosi, led by Mark Strong, returning to the role he unreservedly plays best, the tough, dominant boss who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is his son, who gets his own drivers, bodyguards, respect. Mintz-Plasse is the rare character actor iho's so naturally funny that the first time we see him, I started to laugh, even though he's not doing anything really. There's just something about his look and manner; he's like Woody Allen for our generation. He becomes Red Mist, Kick-Ass's ridiculous yet cunning costumed nemesis.
The charm of this movie is the interweaving of so many rich superhero characters into a fast-moving but expansive plot with a cheerfully tasteless sense of cruel humor. I'm of course speaking mainly of the father-daughter crime-fighting team of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. We're introduced to them when he promises to reward her with ice cream after a training session involving shooting her point-blank while wearing a bulletproof vest. She masters the martial arts possibly more than any movie fighter of any age I can recall. She's particularly skilled with lethal knife-throwing, and is rewarded a foot-long knife by Dad somewhat like a samurai is rewarded a special sword by his sensei. She fearlessly confronts a hallway filled with gun-sporting gangsters, shoots, stabs and beats them all to death. The movie's not taking the easy way out: They don't wail on the floor; she brutally takes their lives, apparently experiencing no emotions about it. She uses heavyweight profanity like a Guy Ritchie thug, and is the toughest, most effective character in the whole story. This is ballsy, fresh and reactionary comedy.
Outside of the superhero and mob characters, all of whom are richly and colorfully defined, the movie is nevertheless just as guilty as the next mainstream movie of not having any clue how to portray high school kids. I'm told that in Mark Millar's original comic, the girl of Kick-Ass's dreams goes from uninterested to appalled when he reveals his secret identity. That'd perfectly befit the film's disregard for the easy way out, which allows it to be so fresh and intriguing. But Hollywood won't have it, as in the most unreasonably stupid scene, he breaks into her room, explains his deceptions and in a completely implausible turn they begin having passionate dirty sex. However, where this would normally sever a movie from my engrossment, this one's working at such a vigorous frequency that I remained interested in its explosive set pieces and ink-black humor.
Perhaps it only seems smarter than it is: There's a scene where Vaughn confidently demonstrates a knowledge of what the audience already knows, where Strong, and we, see Kick-Ass walking down the street from behind, he follows him, eagerly attacks him, all of which occurs without ever giving us exactly what we suspect, but what's more admirable even then is how Vaughn never found it necessary to show the face of the phony Kick-Ass; he knows we know it's not actually him. However, it's never elucidated how they find out later that the Kick-Ass imposter who they attacked was only an imitator and not the actual Kick-Ass. If nobody's aware of who Kick-Ass really is up to that point, how do they know the imposter wasn't the actual Kick-Ass? Well, at any rate, it's difficult not to have fun at this movie.