Kick-Ass? More like Sucked-Ass.

Alternative title: Why am I the only person who realizes this?

May contain spoilers.

I wasn’t aware until we were walking out of the theater that Kick-Ass was the latest in a long and iffy line of comic book adapted movies.  Out of the four of us who went to see it, I was the only one bitching in the end.  And now, as the reviews are in and more of my peers have seen the movie, it continues to be labeled as “awesome” and “must see.”  Sorry, but I feel as though I was unjustly charged actual money to see this garbage, and I will tell you why.

Part of my problem with the movie is, admittingly, not knowing the source material.  I had no clue this was based on a comic book series by the same name, and therefore cannot judge the movie based on how well I feel they captured the essence of the characters.  But I did go into the movie with expectations, and those expectations were handed to me by the trailer for the film.  The trailer is cut in such a way that someone who is not familiar with the comics may think that the movie is a light-hearted comedy about a boy trying to become a real life superhero… and those are the expectations I took into the cinema with me.  Instead, Kick-Ass is a very violent movie. It contains a mass murdering father- 12 year old daughter duo who are also dressed as superheroes, and a cliche, tiring plot about one simple boy getting wrapped up in something much bigger than himself.

Let’s start with the violence.  I am perfectly okay with violence in films if it is done well, I am a huge fan of Tarantino’s work.   Kick-Ass does not have original style when it comes to the violence or action sequences.  Instead, it feels like a Tarantino rip off.  The scenes of graphic violence strike you as something you’ve seen before, perhaps in Kill Bill.  It tried too hard to go for the shock value but failed miserably. Instead of watching something that actually horrified me in it’s gruesomeness, it felt like  cheesy, B horror film violence and gore, fake red corn syrup and all.

Nick Cage and some unknown 12 year old girl play the parts of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, a father daughter team who have been in the game long before Kick-Ass (in case you didn’t know, that’s the young teen Dave’s super hero alter-ego) enters the scene.  If there was anything endearing about this special father-daughter relationship, it was completely overshadowed by the psychopathic need of Nick Cage’s character to train his 12 year old daughter to be a killer and Cage’s terrible, terrible acting. Each time Cage’s character said “child,” as in reference to his daughter, I got a creepy pedophilic vibe from him.

Nick Cage playing his favorite character: Nick Cage.

Speaking of Hit Girl, here is where the majority of the film’s comedic fodder comes in: a 12 year old saying “cunt.”  Sure, we can also count the masturbation scene and the awkwardness of McLovin’s Red Mist character as some of the comedy, but the vast majority of the humor in the movie relies on this one little girl spewing a myriad of cliche one-liners and cuss words that would make a sailor blush.  Again, I have no problem with cussing or the like in movies, but it really got old when the film was using it as a crutch to get a couple of laughs. We get it, it’s fucking ironic a 12 year old pretty little girl would call someone a “cunt” before running across the room to kill him, but we didn’t need to see it done over and over again.  It wasn’t funny after the first dozen times.

She said “cunt.”  I’m literally rolling on the floor laughing, it’s so hilarious.

Then there is the plot.  Is there any plot in the history of movies that is more worn out than ordinary-guy-gets-involved-in-something-way-over-his-head-and-viewers-need-a-flow-chart-just-to-follow-it?  Here is my problem: Take a  movie like Pineapple Express or The Big Lebowski (stoner movies are really guilty of this).  Now, your target audience just wants to watch a movie about other people getting high. You have a likable main character one can relate to and put him in a situation we can all relate to as well. Hilarity ensues and things are going good.  Then take all of that and throw it out the window and replace it instead with a plot involving various levels of an organized crime ring/ govt agency /any type of group so long as it has too many characters to keep track of, and make the plot so ornate that not only is it not believable, but you’d have a hard time following it even sober.

That’s what Kick-Ass is like.

The movie starts with the light-hearted idea of a boy who could try to become a real, crime fighting superhero and ends with him having become resistant to pain due to a Wolverine-like experience, involved with an organized crime operation disguised as a lumber wholesaler, two psychopathic masked vigilantes who have apparently been in the game for a long time but no one has ever heard of them, a plot to trick Kick-Ass into the arms of said crime organization so they could torture and then kill him live on webcam for the whole world to see based on the misguided fact that they believe Kick-Ass killed their drug dealers, said plot involves the crime King Pin’s own son to dress as a similarly lame superhero to gain Kick-Ass’s trust, and a hilarious scene with Nick Cage’s Big Daddy character burning to death all the while shouting in that ridiculous fake voice he put on for the character.

Too.  Much. Lame. Plot. Sometimes, less  really IS more.

All in all, if you are one of the people who claim this movie has become one of your top favorite films of all time, you need to watch more films.  Kick-Ass sucked ass and if I had the choice to do it again, I wouldn’t have even wasted the few seconds it would take to download a pirated version let alone pay money to see it.