Take Names.

About a year ago I took an interest in comic books. It didn't really last long and it only started because I read Watchmen and brashly assumed that there would be other books that might meet that standard of quality. I was wrong, but I did observe an interesting phenomenon spending so much time talking to strangers in the comic book store. Obviously there's only so much you can mine out of the superhero genre before it's totally tapped, but these people go back to the comic store every week and buy more comics supporting an industry that's thrived for almost a century. The limited story possibilities lead to a lot of formulas and retreads in the comic world, to the point where almost nothing is interesting or original. Only when someone like Alan Moore writes a book, not out of unconditional affection for a character but out of the creative aspiration to do something interesting with the medium do we get anything interesting. Comic book fans, therefore, tend to lead an existence of bare incident, where everything is preordained and they don't even expect the entertainment that they invest so much in to surprise them. Take All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for instance. If I had to guess at Frank Miller's feelings towards comic book fans, it would be that he went into the industry optimistic that he could shake things up and move comics away from their formulaic qualities by introducing a darker imagining of Batman, but all this did was change the standard Batman comic into a gravel road of violence and homoerotic frankness. Depressed and/or a little bit blinded by his success, Miller spent the intervening years applying his skills to graphic novels that he at least had artistic control over. When asked to return to Batman and write something with universal appeal, though not as a continuation of his Batman series, he went balls-out, playing fast and loose with canon and turning Batman into a malevolent thug and having him abuse the fuck out of Robin and Alfred. It was genuinely interesting, well-written, subversive and offensive in the way that good satire should be, but comic fans lost their shit. Knowing they could easily go back to the warm comfort of lukewarm writing, they instead decided to buy the book in massive quantities and complain endlessly that their patron saint, Frank Miller, had abandoned them. And he had. Still has. The demands of the comic world are too shallow for someone with creative ambition to stay in the industry more than a few years without becoming resentful. (There's an argument for Frank Miller being one of the best living satirists here, but it's not an argument that's terribly pertinent to Kick Ass).

That's the feeling I got from Kick Ass, the new film from Matthew Vaughn, who still hasn't convinced me that he should be helming feature films or if he should be chased through the streets and punched to death by a dumpster. It's the most standard formula, dressed up and spun around and fed tequila shots a bit, but in the end it's a perfunctory action film with very little to distinguish itself from the dozens of similar films pumped out every year. Actually, I take that back. This film is more bland and standard than almost any major action film, because they at least have the decency to shake things up even a little bit, but Kick Ass is dicey and poorly executed in ways that the most atrociously bland movie one could assemble wouldn't be.

The film concerns a teenager named Dave played by Aaron Johnson, who's going through the "why aren't I a superhero?" stage of puberty that comes after the pubic hair but before the nipple worms, but he takes it a step further and actually dresses up as a superhero, buys himself some batons and manages to get himself knifed in broad daylight the first time he tries to fight some crime. When he recovers, he dresses up again and quickly encounters a group of men beating the fuck out of some pussy. Dave steps in and a brilliant action sequence ensues. It's exciting, tense, perfectly staged and scored (to a Prodigy song called Omen) and Johnson gets a little speech that really builds up the audience's emotional involvement in the scene and gets them hopped up and ready for a triumphant, crowd-pleasing action scene and then...it ends. Like that. The bad guys just walk away. It was a tremendous disappointment that set the tone for the rest of the film, and really, after all the hype about how it was going to be porn for action film fans, I wanted to push an active volcano into the theater and erupt it all over your seat. YES, YOUR SEAT AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The only truly excellent action scene is a short one that falls in the middle of the film and doesn't add much to the plot, but it's shocking for its frank use of violence, whereas earlier in the film people were getting legs sliced off and things like that, which really took away from the "normal people as superheroes" angle, and it was nice to see an action scene that wasn't cartoonish but contained some shocking violence. Oh, and it's on Youtube. So you can send me whatever you were planning on spending on a ticket. Paypal is okay, but I'd prefer cash in an envelope left under a tree in the park. You know the place. The one where you left your girlfriend's ransom money last summer. I MADE HER INTO A HAT. I believe the success of the scene has a lot to do with its status as a throwaway scene, most likely inserted into the film to keep it moving along at a steady pace and not really subject to Vaughn's recurring aesthetic. It's simpler, and it works a lot better for that.

The film also concerns a few other heroes, specifically Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) who introduced retardedly late in the film so that they won't outshine the main character for the entire film. Without those characters, not only would the studio not have its retarded marketing campaign, but it wouldn't have a film. The entire film is so dependent on them to work and so disinterested in Dave that the entire thing could have not only been successful, but been greatly improved by the exclusion of Dave, who only seems to have been included to give the 18-35 demographic an easy point of reference. His arc is done after he meets Big Daddy and Hit Girl, when he realizes that he's fooling himself and that he'd rather be a Myspace celebrity (really, Hollywood? Myspace?) and the film suffers greatly from his stupid narration. While I've never seen the original cut of Blade Runner, I'd imagine that the narration sounded like this, underlining every little thing that happens, spelling out motivations and themes for stupid people, and generally being a useless asshole.

Most people I know were pretty into the Hit Girl thing, but I don't see how a little girl killing people and saying fuck is very original. You guys should come hang out at my parents' house or something. At least Moretz plays the role with straightforwardness as opposed to the jokiness that I thought she'd employ, and it gives her a bit more credibility as a character who's meant to be a human being made out of flesh and blood and not titanium alloy and wizard poop, which is what Vaughn seems to have been going for.

So what did I think? It sort of sucked. It missed almost every possible opportunity and even Nicolas Cage wasn't that good (which, going by the Cage Curve, should earn him an Oscar). The humor, which really got hyped up by the ad campaign, really fucking bugged me. Most of the jokes were totally throw-away or "little girl says fuck". The only thing that made me laugh was the guy in the back who thought the movie was fucking hilarious, and when a cinema audience on a Tuesday night is more interesting than the movie, go fuck yourself.

4/10