‘Kick Ass’

Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong

by Steve Mainprize

Sometimes it takes a while to for a film’s true worth to become apparent. When a new release first hits the multiplexes, buoyed up by the audience’s sense of anticipation and a fully-mobilised Hollywood publicity machine, there’s a momentum that can go a long way towards covering up any flaws.

I only caught up with Kick-Ass on its recent DVD release. The trailers were a hoot, suggesting some sort of gleefully violent punk rock Spider-Man, a low-rent B-movie antidote to the po-facedness of recent installments of certain superhero franchises, but as it ended I found myself feeling slightly disappointed. Partly, I think, this was because all the best bits were in the trailers, which do rather too good a job of explaining what it’s all about and don’t leave much room for the viewer to be surprised during the film itself. The other problem is that underneath the epic levels of violence and bad language, it’s basically your standard superhero movie.

Kick-Ass is often very funny, particularly as Kick-Ass’ exploits spin more and more out of control and he gets further and further out of his depth. And it does look fantastic. Its colour palette – reminiscent of Warren Beatty’s comic book adaptation, Dick Tracy – and brightly-lit daytime scenes reflect its printed sources of inspiration, and the fight scenes, although they’re full of quick cuts, deserve much credit for avoiding the disorientation that audiences of modern action movies often experience. You can actually see what’s going on.

The film and the comic book were conceived simultaneously as an interesting pair of cross-media projects: strictly speaking, the film is not an adaptation, so it’s not as if the movie is hamstrung by the limitations of the original medium. Kick-Ass could have followed any path, so the fact that it chose to follow the one laid out by thirty years of superhero adaptations, not to mention seventy years of superhero comics, is quite surprising.

Plot point after plot point echoes what we’ve seen before time and time again, going back at least to Richard Donner’s 1978 version of Superman. For example, here Aaron Johnson plays Kick-Ass, a crimefighter whose secret civilian identity is a bit of a dweeb. Also see, amongst others: Christopher Reeve in Superman, Michael Keaton in Batman, Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. There’s a beautiful woman, with a thing for the hero’s more glamorous alter ego – here she’s Katie, played by Lyndsy Fonseca, but in Superman she was Margot Kidder, in Batman she was Kim Basinger and in Spider-Man (up to a point) she was Kirsten Dunst.

Subsequently, the genre convention states that there must be a scene in which the hero reveals his secret identity to the heroine. “Look,” he says, or possibly implies, “Ta-da! I’m not a dweeb after all!” “Gosh!” she replies, “I was wrong about you all along!” And she falls in love with him.

There’s a reason that this twisted relationship repeats time after time in comic-book adaptations: it’s wish-fulfilment for the comic-book reader, and therefore written into the DNA of the source material. Ironically, Kick-Ass (the comic) sidesteps the cliché: the girlfriend character is horrified at being deceived and Kick-Ass gets another beating. Kick-Ass (the movie), however, follows the template exactly, and the hero gets the girl. This, I think, reveals that Kick-Ass (the movie) is still a little bit too much in love with the conventions of the comic book.

Other tropes include the psycho mob-boss villain, the gang of henchmen, the climactic face-off high above the city and the villain’s subsequent metaphorical and literal downfall (all of which are in Burton’s Batman, but it’s my guess that you’ll find at least one in every superhero film). It’s clear, though, that we’re supposed to get these allusions. Kick-Ass doesn’t exactly hide its reference points, from the opening titles that ape Donner’s Superman, to Nicolas Cage’s channelling of 1960s TV Batman Adam West’s hammy speech patterns, to the final line of dialogue, originally spoken by Jack Nicholson in Batman. And if Cage’s Big Daddy character is as close to a Batman analogue as could be achieved without a plagiarism charge, that means that Hit Girl is Robin, but made hyper-violent and famously sweary, not to mention younger and female, presumably to emphasise the irresponsibility of taking a child with you to fight crime.

Furthermore, the protagonists do have superpowers, despite the film’s high-concept idea of “what if superheroes existed in the real world?” (itself in danger of becoming a cliché, in the wake of Watchmen and Chistopher Nolan’s Batman movies). Kick-Ass himself, woefully over-ambitious and underprepared for crime-fighting, suffers a beating that leaves him with metal plates throughout his skeleton and an inability to feel pain – useful, because he’s always on the wrong end of a fight – whilst the other characters have the superpower of unlimited wealth and resources, which they share, of course, with Bruce Wayne.

Although Kick-Ass seemingly aspires to be something other than just another superhero flick, in the end it conforms to the conventions of the genre, perhaps too fond of its inspirations to truly break free of them. It wants to have its cake, beat the living crap out of it, then eat it.