Kick Ass

When I first saw the preview for Kick Ass I was excited to see it. I thought it was going to be funny, action packed, and it seemed a lot different from your average super hero movies. Maybe take a little poke at the standard genre yet still exploring a new look at what it is to be a hero.

Mr. X and I went to see this movie expecting it to be a culminating moment for superhero movies, when the super power free geek rises to hero status just by being awesome. But there was very little awesome about this movie. One of it’s major problems was that this movie did not know it wanted to be. While it had a lot of great stylistic elements and a few decent action sequences, it wasn’t anything resembling funny. Maybe I missed the point but humor was what I expected after seeing the trailers.

Kick Ass ended up being insanely different from what I expected. And that might just be MY expectations disappointing me. As I said, I expected it to be a comedy, or have more comedic elements. It ended up being really wacky, dramatic, bloody action movie. I guess in part I just wasn’t paying enough attention, because there is quite a bit of blood spatter and messed up faces in the posters and other advertizing materials.

Kick Ass, aka geeky kid in spandex, becomes an internet sensation when You Tube features security video of a fight he got into. He becomes a hero for the modern world, but this modern world is deep in the underbelly of comic book gangsters and nefarious activity. A story that started very grounded in our known world begins to spiral in the hyperbolic world of blood, murder, and mayhem. There are normal kids hanging out in a normal way, interacting the way kids do and then people’s body parts are exploding while the “heroes” stand by laughing at the destruction.

Is moral apathy in some way essential to being a comic book hero? Must you love for the innocent and hate the guilty with so much passion that it becomes a joy to destroy them?

Kick Ass is just a boy in tights with some foam sticks beating people. He doesn’t band together with other geeks to rise righteously against injustice. He is the perfect example of what Mr. X would call a bumbling idiot.

Kick Ass can (according to the advertisement to the left) apparently kick your ass, but the fact of the matter is that he can’t fly or kick your mama’s ass. He isn’t some triumphant geek to hero, he is a worthless sissy boy who needs the help of over trained and bored “heroes” who aren’t out to better the world, they are not ridding the world of evil but are out for revenge.

Maybe I am just too idealistic to think that a hero should have a grain of good will. The villain is always trying to better himself, his situation in society, and sometimes even, in some warped, way better society itself. But the “heroes” of Kick Ass are not motivated by anything as noble as that of a common villain. Revenge is what creates a weak villain and creates and even weaker super heroes.

Oh, and one of my other issues with this movie?
Way too much of this guy:

That’s right. Everyone’s favorite comic book obsessed actor in the role of Big Daddy. Yep, also misled by the previews i expected Big Daddy to be a minor supporting role in Kick Ass. Dealing with the amount of screen time he had made me want to throw up all over myself and the person sitting next to me.