Does It Actually Kick Ass?

I really, really enjoyed 3/4 of this movie. And by 3/4, I don’t mean that there were scenes and parts of Kick Ass that I thought were okay while the rest of the movie was great and those pieces brought the film down. No… I mean that I was completely into this movie 100% with all systems rocking and rolling and then… it starts to lose its footing… and then falls off the rails completely and crashes and burns while I sit in my theater seat, mouth agape, thinking “why the hell did this fantastic movie have to go and do that?” I literally felt like I was watching a pro athlete have an amazing, record breaking season and then enters the playoffs and decides he’s going to dress as the mascot, starts shooting t-shirts out of the t-shirt cannon and getting drunk in the cheap seats instead. Having seen and thought about the movie for over a month, the dirt is no longer fresh. I can now eulogize what could have been the coolest comic book movie ever… but decided to take a hard turn towards the ridiculousness within site of the goal line. This is the 1998 Utah Jazz, the best team in the NBA all season, who in the most important game of their history let Michael Jordan strip the ball, hit a no ref call jumper in their face and take the lead and championship while they all stood around saying “what the fuck just happened?”

What makes it worse is that Kick Ass is not a dismissible movie. This isn’t Fantastic Four or Elektra. This movie is made by storytellers at the top of their game just rocking out from the opening bell. Kick Ass starts out at a solid clip and doesn’t let go until all the pieces are in place. Like the comic book, everything is set up clearly and the thesis makes sense for a compelling story: “What if real people tried to be superheroes?” In the comic book, we got two to three issues of origin story and we get the same with the opening thirty minutes here. We meet Dave Lizewski and his nerdy group of friends. We are introduced to the girl of his dreams, his complete inability to talk to her and his daydreams of becoming as cool as the characters in his comic book. And on top of everything, the dialogue, the pace and the tone of everything is cool. This is something familiar but absolutely fresh. Right from the start, I was a huge fan of Kick Ass.

The movie does a few things differently then the comics but pacing wise falls into similar, yet unavoidable holes while for the most part being a fun ride. Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s characters are introduced and explained at roughly the same time that Dave is putting together his Kick Ass persona and going through multiple hilarious fails on his way to internet cult status. Vaughn keeps everything super fresh and Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz rock on screen. This is Nar Williams’ Nic Cage… the one who we love from Raising Arizona. The pair just bounce all over the screen and keep Dave’s internal tribulations (and the brutality with which he is repeatedly getting his ass kicked) light. The backstory is different for their characters from what’s in the comic book but I actually prefer the film version. In the comics, Damon Macready is just a comic book enthusiast who is taking the Punisher approach to becoming a hero… and his daughter is along for the ride because why not, her mom is dead. The Damon Macready in the movie is much more believable as an ex-cop and his war on crime is more grounded and justified. His focus on Mark Strong’s Frank D’Amico crime lord give the movie its through line that Kick Ass is about to be washed right into.

A couple of the jaw-dropping dramatic beats from the comic are left out as well like the reveal of Red Mist’s background in issue 6-7. This is a movie now and the writing team of Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn do a nice job of making concessions to the big reveals in the comic in order to get everyone introduced early and set them up for their roles in the story. Christopher Mintz-Plasse plays a good Red Mist, son of a rich guy, heir to a crime throne and we know this right off the bat. We don’t wait until Hit Girl has sliced up a room of bad guys in front of Kick Ass to see what she can do. We know this in the first 15 minutes before she and Dave have even met.

The important thing here is that we are seeing all of these characters re-introduced when they crash into Dave’s world and we see them anew through Dave’s eyes and that’s an often missed hurdle when adapting things from a comic book medium. In a comic, the reader is the see all and he can go back, re-flip, voice and pace out sequences how they see fit. With a comic book, the reader leads themselves through the story. In a film, the protagonist leads your emotional beats through the story at a much faster pace and is the cataloguer of the most important sites and sounds. Aaron Johnson, Matthew Vaughn and the script do an amazing job of bringing you piece by piece through everything and keeping it clicking.

Then the second act slump that effected the comic kicks in. Kick Ass is now a superhero and there are others who are superheroes as well. Now what happens? The movie handles this slump a bit better than the comics (not helped at all by the giant wait between issues) by letting you know that a lot of things are still in play around him while Dave flexes his newfound popularity (if not responsibilities). We get a lot of Hit Girl and Big Daddy here and Frank D’Amico ups his aggression towards these new “costumed weirdos” that are messing up his business. Hell, Dave might even muster up enough confidence to tell the girl of his dreams (who he’s gotten to know by convincing he was gay) how he really feels. Man, like in the comics, all of the pieces are set for an awesome finale!

But something else happens instead. After over an hour of giving us a really solid, and for the most part realistic, take on the idea of “what would happen if a real person tried to be a superhero”, the movie… I can barely go on, I hated it so much… IT TOOK THE EASY WAY OUT! It’s as if the story stopped, looked at the great things it had done and resigned itself to “we can’t ACTUALLY deliver on this can we!?!” Can the movie actually deliver on what it set up? We don’t even get a chance to find out, it bails out some completely. And if you’re up for some serious spoilers, I’ll tell you exactly where it all starts to go down hill…

———- SERIOUSLY. IT’S NOT LIKE IN THE COMIC ———-

———- I MEAN IT. I’M GOING TO SPOIL IT. ———-

———- I’M GOING TO SPOIL THE COMIC TOO ———-

———- OKAY. YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE ———-

———- YOU’VE READ THE COMIC ———-

———- OR YOU’RE AN IDIOT ———-

———- OR JUST DON’T CARE ———-

———- YOU WERE WARNED ———-

Dave gets the girl of his dreams after revealing himself as Kick Ass. From that point on, all of the realism and tension in the movie goes out the window. It really is a serious “what the fuck?” moment. I thought I was watching a dream sequence and was failing to get the obligatory “haha! It was just a dream!” shot of Dave waking up in his bed or in the back of a bad guy’s trunk. The entire movie, every time Dave tries to do the right thing, it slaps him in the face. During this sequence in the comics, when he does the right thing by telling her the truth about his feelings, SHE slaps him in the face (and then tells a jock to beat his ass because he “tried to rape her”). In the movie… he spends the night and then a few scenes later have sex behind the comic book store in a dirty ass alley. It’s not like this is even Dave’s reward for beating the bad guys and saving the day… He still has to do all that! But why!?! He’s ALREADY GOT THE GIRL! Now he’s just being an asshole and running around in tights. After this scene (ripped completely from the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man #13… Bendis, demand a check), the movie doesn’t just NOT work… it falls apart spectacularly.

The goofball bad guys don’t just stay goofballs… they take Frank D’Amico with them. Kick Ass and Big Daddy’s kidnapping scene is literally broadcast over the internet. Really? We’re supposed to take these bad guys seriously when, instead of just blowing Big Daddy’s brains out and moving on after he’s picked them apart the whole movie, they dance around like Mr. Blonde and light him on fire… on the internet! Really? In a world of realistic crime committing villains, THIS is what they do!?! They Youtube the shit-storm they just created like a bunch of frat kids throwing toilets off a roof? Ridiculous!

There is a build up to a jet pack that wears out it’s welcome LONG before the jet pack is even on screen. And then when it IS on screen, it is so cartoony that you are hating it for having the audacity to reveal itself. Why did they do this? Why did the filmmakers painstakingly spend 3/4s of their movie crafting something sound, realistic and original only to turn it into Hanna Barbera’s Wacky Races at the end? Nothing mattered after Dave got the girl of his dreams and Hit Girl fails to save Big Daddy (who is burning to death for about five minutes instead of just being one and done’d by a gun shot). I was in total shock when the credits started to roll… and it wasn’t from Roger “Trapjaw” Ebert’s socially reprehensible findings. I honestly couldn’t believe that Kick Ass had come this far and done so many things amazingly well just to completely blow it in the final act. Sorry, Geekscapists… we were really close on this one.

“Jonathan said WHAT now!?!”

The above is a picture of the actual Trapjaw from He-Man making my face during the end of this movie when they’re flying away on the silly jetpack.