I saw this movie a little over a week ago. I didn’t like it then and the more I think about it, the less I like it.
2010 Movies In Order of How Much I Liked Them
1. Greenberg
2. Shutter Island
3. Date Night
4. Kick-Ass
I had three main problems with Kick-Ass:
1) It betrays its own premise. The story of a guy trying to be a superhero in the real world could be really interesting, and the movie goes through great pains to establish this as the real world early on. The scenes that embrace this idea work really well— Kick-Ass afraid to jump from one building to the next, Kick-Ass and Red Mist just hanging out, listening to Gnarls Barkley— but this isn’t the real world, this is comic book world. That’s a problem with the art direction— I wish this movie looked more like Hancock (never thought I’d say that) — but it’s also a problem with the story itself. It’s firmly established that the movie takes place in a world without Batman, and then later we meet Batman, and Batman’s daughter, who is also Batman.
2) Kick-Ass is by far the least interesting character, but he’s given the most amount of screen time. Any one of the other characters would have made a better subject for a movie— Hit Girl, Red Mist, Nicolas Cage, even Kick-Ass’s two dopey friends.
3) The morality of this movie really squigged me out. It reminded me a lot of Wanted (which I later realized was based on a comic by the same author of Kick-Ass) in that it was the story of a normal guy who learns that killing people is really fucking cool. Someone asked me why this movie bothered me so much, but Kill Bill doesn’t, and I don’t have a good answer. Maybe there’s an uncanny valley of violence?
