Dragonlaird Gaming Studios

Movie Review: Kick-Ass

Okay, I think I’ve made it quite clear that I’m a comic book junkie and a comic book movie junkie.  So the trailers for Kick-Ass looked pretty interesting.  Take a kid in our world who wonders why no one becomes a superhero. Give him a run-in with muggers and the hood of a car that leaves him with metal plates in half his body and a lot of screwed up nerve endings.  That’s a super as he gets, physically.  His ability?  The ability to get beat up a lot and keep going.  He runs into other new super heroes and attracts the attention of a real bad guy, a drug lord hiding behind a lumber company as his front.

I read a couple of the comics before the movie, but I didn’t read the graphic novel (which sits on my shelf waiting to be read) before going to the movie.  I wasn’t totally surprised that the movie put in the amount of violence, blood, and gore that it did, but just pretty disappointed.  I know they were “staying true to the comic book” but it was like watching Quentin Tarantino as a teenager trying to make a movie.  It was just over the top.  I guess maybe the same people who can sit through Hostel and Saw would probably not have a problem with Kick Ass, but in my doddering opinion, it just wasn’t necessary.  Effort put into having people’s heads blow up in your face might have been put in giving any of the characters some heart or depth.  Only Nicholas Cage’s whack-job of an obsessed father (Big Daddy) had you caring what happened to him.  The rest had the emotional investment of characters in a teenage sex farce.

I wanted the movie to be good.  I always want the movie to be good.  I watch movies looking for the good stuff.  But some movies bring so much of the bad that even the stuff they do well gets lost.  There was a good movie to be made here, but director Matthew Vaughn’s third attempt at directing falls far short.  (But looking him up on imdb explains a lot… he was a producer for two of Guy Ritchie’s British gang films: Snatch; and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.  He directed a wannabe Guy Ritchie film called Layer Cake which didn’t live up to the promise.  Shoulda cribbed more notes from Guy.)