"Kick-Ass" Kicks Ass
#TalkNerdytoMeLover's According to Adam
If you're not familiar with the Mark Miller/John Romita Jr. comic "Kick-Ass", you may get the impression from the TV ads and trailers for the movie that it's a fun, light-hearted tale of regular people who decide to try to be super heroes.
It's not.
Oh, it's funny, there's no doubt about that. Millar's dark humor permaeates the entire script. But it's not "light-hearted" by any measure. It's incredibly violent, profane and at times pretty dark -- which is what makes the movie a success. It's a pretty faithful retelling of Millar's original printed story, which didn't pull any punches with its graphic-ness (it's not 100% faithful to the source material, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Wanted", which completely distorted Millar's original story).
I'm not going to re-hash the story for you here, since you can read about that any number of places, including in the original comic itself. I will say that this is definitely a movie worth seeing. It doesn't change the super-hero genre in any way, and for all the tweaking of the genre early in the movie, it actually comes all the way back around to include many of the same clichés we've come to expect from comic book movies. Hell, for all of Kick Ass's talk about how he's just a normal guy trying to be a super hero, he actually doesn't really succeed as the super hero thing until after he has metal plates inserted into his body and suffers an accident that leaves him with dulled nerve endings (and no, you don't get a spoiler alert tag for that... the comic's been out for more than two years, and it's a relatively minor spoiler anyway).
There are plenty of insider comic book references that the fans of the genre will enjoy, including indirect references to Spider-Man (the comic and the movie), direct references to Batman, and entire scenes set at a comic book shop. There's even an "origin story" scene done entirely in comic book art, beautifully drawn by John Romita Jr.
The success of the movie hinges not on Kick Ass himself (played by Aaron Johnson) but on Hit Girl, the ultra-violent profanity-spewing 11-year-old played by 13-year-old Chloe Moretz. Some critics have complained that Hit Girl is being positioned as a cussing Lolita, but I just didn't see it. There's nothing in the movie that sexualizes her at all, aside from one outfit she wears to get the drop on some bad guys. Instead, she's just ridiculously over the top in terms of profanity and violence, which pretty much just makes her awesome.
Plain and simple, "Kick-Ass" kicks ass. Go see it.
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