Kick-Ass

I saw this film after all the hype, all the positive reviews and all the “KICKASS kicks ass!” comments, and despite all that…I fuckin’ loved the shit out of it! Originality has always been something I look for in my movies, and this film’s premise is certainly creative, not to mention something many of us (geeks) have thought about on our own. This movie packs a punch creatively, but it’s also filled with plenty of awesome action sequences, believable and funny dialogue, plenty of comic book and pop culture references and a handful of fun characters all jam-packed into a cinematic collage created by director Mathew Vaughn, who demonstrates an acute understanding of this world. It’s also got an awesome soundtrack, which includes some really peppy songs played throughout ultra-violent sequences, that I thought worked really well (my personal fave being Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” playing in the background as sweet l’il Hitgirl blasted bullets into baddies like it was going out of style). The film’s paced really well, starts off feeling like a typical R-rated teen comedy but ultimately shifts into a full-blown action movie, featuring a handful of fun characters all looking to “play superhero” in this fantastical, yet somewhat realistic, movie world (my favorite scene in this respect was the first one in which Kickass approaches 2 thugs in a garage lot and confronts them). Ouch.

The irony is that despite being a pretty steady lead, the character of Kickass wasn’t as interesting or entertaining to me as was Hitgirl, for example (the very awesome Chloë Grace Moretz). I really loved all of her scenes with her dad, played oddly by Nicolas Cage (what’s with the strange accent?), and even moreso, her own kill-ass sequences, in which she spryly delivered death onto dozens upon dozens of baddies. Her cute smile throughout made those scenes all the more fun to watch and for any fuddy-duddy who thinks her naughty dialogue and bloody carnage is out of line for a kid her age…guess what? This is a movie and the last time I checked, this is an R-rated fantasy movie made for adults, not children! Aaron Johnson played his own Clark Kent-type teen character as awkward as you’d expect from a teenager, and it was nice to see McLovin’ (aka Cristopher Mintz-Plasse) delivering a performance that wasn’t so much like his character from SUPERBAD. The only thing I didn’t like about his character was that they played him too “in the middle”, so I was never really sure where he was coming from. I also didn’t think his character was “big” enough to end the movie on, but that’s just a slight nitpick in an otherwise awesome fun time movie that packs plenty of coolness, action, adventure and comic book fantasy into a well-oiled movie machine.

PS: I’m not sure if the scene in which Kickass visits his girl’s ex-boyfriend was in the comic book or not, but that scene was an obvious homage to a similar scene from Tony Scott’s TRUE ROMANCE, which I thought was a sweet nod. “It ain’t white boy day, is it?”