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Kick-Ass

Started by CaledonianGonzo, March 26, 2010, 08:48:33 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Whug Baspin

From the interviews I've watched Matthew Vaughn seems slightly exasperated at Mark Millers 'outlandish' statements, He mentioned Mark saying 'they've made a chick flick' in a tone that suggested this. 

j_u_d_a_s

I'm positive that Mark Miller is taking the piss out of the whole non-furore the mail is attempting to whip up.

Anyway, the review has come in and it's a fantastic piece of self-satire!
Quote
Don't be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood.


Kick-Ass (15)                                                                                           

Verdict: Evil
Rating: * (out of 5)

Millions are being spent to persuade you that Kick-Ass is harmless, comic-book entertainment suitable for 15-year-olds.

Don't let them fool you. Kick-Ass has been so hyped that it is certain to be a hit. It is also bound be among the most influential movies of 2010. And that should disturb us all.

It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.


Damaging role model: Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl in Kick-Ass

The title character is nerdy American teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson from Nowhere Boy). He yearns to be a superhero so he dresses up as one. The trouble is that he has no superpowers and - unlike Batman - no money.

His one asset as a crime fighter is that he can survive serious thrashings because his nerve-endings have been destroyed by previous beatings. Like Wolverine in X-Men, he has metal plates where some of his bones should be.

The movie's central appeal is to fanboys like Dave, who will spot the references to previous comic-strip movies, and imagine that these constitute satire. Really, the tone of the movie is deferential pastiche.

The plot is an unimaginative clone of Spider-Man 2, and the screenplay - by director Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, wife of comic-book enthusiast Jonathan Ross - conforms slavishly to the cliched norms of Hollywood action movies by working towards not one but two huge action set-pieces at its climax.

As a rip-off of its Hollywood betters, it is sporadically funny, efficient, and well shot  -  hence my arguably overgenerous award of one star.

The biggest problem of the movie, creatively speaking, is that it has pretensions to intelligence but is profoundly, irredeemably bone-headed.

It starts as though it's going to expose the huge gulf between comic strips and reality, but ends up reducing the real world to the most morally fatuous kind of comic strip.

A worthwhile satire on comic-book culture might criticise the idiotic way it uses sadism and voyeurism to entertain, with no thought of the social consequences.

It would also lampoon the risible pretentiousness of many so-called graphic novels. Kick-Ass does neither.

The movie looks at first as if it might satirise the era where talentless nonentities can become celebrities. But it has nothing to say about that either.


Superhero: Aaron Johnson as Kick-Ass

Although it runs nearly two hours, there's even less character development than there is social comment. Our hero learns nothing, except that extreme violence against criminals is cool, which is something he thought in the first place.

The reason the movie is sick, as well as thick, is that it breaks one of the last cinematic taboos by making the most violent, foul-mouthed and sexually aggressive character, Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old.

Played with enormous confidence by Chloe Moretz, she's the most charismatic character in the movie. She may not realise it, but she has been systematically abused by her father, brainwashed and turned into a pint-sized

She believes that her vigilante dad (played, simplistically, for laughs by Nicolas Cage) is a hero just as much at the end as she did at the beginning.

Her attitude towards him doesn't mature, which makes her pathetic, rather than cool. The fact that many people who see the film are going to think she is cool is one of its most depressing aspects.

The movie's writers want us to see Hit-Girl not only as cool, but also sexy, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino's Kill Bill 1. Paedophiles are going to adore her.

One of the film's creepiest aspects is that she's made to look as seductive as possible - much more so than in the Mark Millar and John Romita Jr comic book on which this is based. She's fetishised in precisely the same way as Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, and Halle Berry in Catwoman.

As if that isn't exploitative enough, she's also shown in a classic schoolgirl pose, in a short plaid-skirt with her hair in bunches, but carrying a big gun.

And she makes comments unprintable in a family newspaper, that reveal a sexual knowledge hugely inappropriate to her years.

Oh, and one of the male teenage characters acknowledges that he's attracted to her.

Now, children committing violent and sexual acts should be a matter for concern. Children carrying knives are not cool, but a real and present danger.

Underage sex isn't a laugh. Recent government figures revealed that in this country more than 8,000 children under the age of 16 conceive every year.

Worldwide child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry. In Africa and South America, brutalised youngsters who kill and rape are rightly feared as members of feral gangs or child soldiers.

Movies such as City Of God, Innocent Voices and Johnny Mad Dog have treated the issue with sensitivity.

But in Kick-Ass, childish violence of the most extreme kind - hacking off limbs, shootings in the mouth, impalings and fatal stabbings - is presented with calculated flippancy, as funny, admirable and (most perversely of all) sexually arousing.

The film-makers are sure to argue that there's nothing wrong with breaking down taboos of taste - but there are often good reasons for taboos.

Do we really want to live, for instance, in a culture when the torture and killing of a James Bulger or Damilola Taylor is re-enacted by child actors for laughs?

The people behind this grotesque glorification of prematurely sexualised, callously violent children know full well that they are going to make a lot of money, and they'll get an easy ride from the vast majority of reviewers, who either don't care about the social effects of movies or are frightened to appear ' moralistic' or 'judgmental'.

The truth is, of course, that all critics moralise and make judgments, whether they realise they are doing so or not. So please don't be misled. Kick-Ass is not the harmless fun it pretends to be.

Yes, it's lightweight and silly, but it's also cynical, premeditated and mindbogglingly irresponsible.

And in Hit-Girl, the film-makers have created one of the most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema.

Really... where do you begin when you read something like that? It's just hideously un-self-aware! Can't believe how they feel they have to mention that Jane Goldman is married to Jonathan Ross when she's a broadcaster in her own right but then what better way to carry out their pointless vendetta against Ross by sniping at his family?

Lyndon

I loved this. Probably the only bad point was Dave's relationship with...the love interest, well I've forgotten her name already, which is apt cos she was just a pair of tits, which seems to be enough of a character trait in many of these movies. Or maybe it was a satire of that, given the groping at the first kiss scene. I don't think so though, as the 'gay bff thing' was played straight (no pun intended) so she probably was just vapidly written.

Still, I'm struggling to find faults. Most fun I've had at the cinema in a long, long time. Hit Girl indeed stole the show.

kidsick5000

For a movie centred and named after the main character, it's surprising how little you care for him and all your care is centrd on Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, who are amazing. Astonishingly I like Cage in this. There's a bit where what looks like bad acting is revealed to be
Spoiler alert
a front for the benefit of his  daughter
[close]
but his Adam West Batman impression when in Big Daddy mode is hilarious.

For anyone who has seen it, I have to ask. (PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE YET TO SEE IT)
Do you not think
Spoiler alert
there's an alternate ending? A 'Brazil' ending.
Spoiler alert
The finale is so 'out there' that it could in theory cut back to any number of earlier scenes and reveal the true ending
[close]
[close]

SavageHedgehog

While a bit overlong and with a few notable mis-steps (in particular the routine between Cage and his daugther about puppies and Bratz dolls seemed jarringly broad), I really enjoyed this and wasn't particularly expecting to as the trailers left little impression on me, which when combined with burnout on both comic book movies and the kind of Apatow-esque humour the movie seemed to be promising and my apathy towards the last Mark Miller adaptation Wanted didn't make it all that much of an enticing proposition for me. Cage's West impression was a really nice touch and I was glad it wasn't explicitly pointed out by any of the characters. Mark Strong made a much better villain here than in Sherlock Holmes, and I thought he was none too shabby there.

I take it Miller was talking about the movie rather than his own work with the "for/by Daily Mail readers" comment? You can imagine the film would actually go over well with with the Mail crowd if one of the characters wasn't a fowl-mouthed eleven year old girl.

Catalogue Trousers

Yeah, somebody on another forum has already pointed out that, if Hit Girl were an ageing "I can't stands no more - let's kill some hoodies" type like Michael Caine's Harry Brown, then Chris Tookey would have loved it - as he indeed did with Harry Brown, giving it 5 stars.

amputeeporn

Was out for a wander earlier and just chanced this not knowing much about it. I thought it was a blast from start to finish: there were missteps, but the casting was great, the acting was good (even Cage!) and I love that it plays as though they just made their vision with no compromises. It's the little touches that build to make this so much fun, many of which would have been trimmed or softened in the hands of other people. I also like its deference to the Spider-Man film series, and think that a lot of things the film wanted to touch on might have been lost without that.

Those Daily Mail comments about Hit Girl being 'sexualised' betray more about the review writer than anything in the film. It's actually upsetting how much of his own ugly world view he's attaching to Kick Ass. Also his mention of a character being attracted to her ignores the joke that comes immediately after, one which is obviously aimed at anyone who would want to write a knee-jerk review like that piece of shit up there.

hummingofevil

"Don't be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood.


Kick-Ass (15)                                                                                           

Verdict: Evil
Rating: * (out of 5)

Millions are being spent to persuade you that Kick-Ass is harmless, comic-book entertainment suitable for 15-year-olds.

Don't let them fool you. Kick-Ass has been so hyped that it is certain to be a hit. It is also bound be among the most influential movies of 2010. And that should disturb us all.

It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.


Damaging role model: Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl in Kick-Ass

The title character is nerdy American teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson from Nowhere Boy). He yearns to be a superhero so he dresses up as one. The trouble is that he has no superpowers and - unlike Batman - no money.

His one asset as a crime fighter is that he can survive serious thrashings because his nerve-endings have been destroyed by previous beatings. Like Wolverine in X-Men, he has metal plates where some of his bones should be.

The movie's central appeal is to fanboys like Dave, who will spot the references to previous comic-strip movies, and imagine that these constitute satire. Really, the tone of the movie is deferential pastiche.

The plot is an unimaginative clone of Spider-Man 2, and the screenplay - by director Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, wife of comic-book enthusiast Jonathan Ross - conforms slavishly to the cliched norms of Hollywood action movies by working towards not one but two huge action set-pieces at its climax.

As a rip-off of its Hollywood betters, it is sporadically funny, efficient, and well shot  -  hence my arguably overgenerous award of one star.

The biggest problem of the movie, creatively speaking, is that it has pretensions to intelligence but is profoundly, irredeemably bone-headed.

It starts as though it's going to expose the huge gulf between comic strips and reality, but ends up reducing the real world to the most morally fatuous kind of comic strip.

A worthwhile satire on comic-book culture might criticise the idiotic way it uses sadism and voyeurism to entertain, with no thought of the social consequences.

It would also lampoon the risible pretentiousness of many so-called graphic novels. Kick-Ass does neither.

The movie looks at first as if it might satirise the era where talentless nonentities can become celebrities. But it has nothing to say about that either.


Superhero: Aaron Johnson as Kick-Ass

Although it runs nearly two hours, there's even less character development than there is social comment. Our hero learns nothing, except that extreme violence against criminals is cool, which is something he thought in the first place.

The reason the movie is sick, as well as thick, is that it breaks one of the last cinematic taboos by making the most violent, foul-mouthed and sexually aggressive character, Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old.

Played with enormous confidence by Chloe Moretz, she's the most charismatic character in the movie
. She may not realise it, but she has been systematically abused by her father, brainwashed and turned into a pint-sized

She believes that her vigilante dad (played, simplistically, for laughs by Nicolas Cage) is a hero just as much at the end as she did at the beginning.

Her attitude towards him doesn't mature, which makes her pathetic, rather than cool. The fact that many people who see the film are going to think she is cool is one of its most depressing aspects.

The movie's writers want us to see Hit-Girl not only as cool, but also sexy
, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino's Kill Bill 1. Paedophiles are going to adore her.

One of the film's creepiest aspects is that she's made to look as seductive as possible - much more so than in the Mark Millar and John Romita Jr comic book on which this is based. She's fetishised in precisely the same way as Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, and Halle Berry in Catwoman.

As if that isn't exploitative enough, she's also shown in a classic schoolgirl pose, in a short plaid-skirt with her hair in bunches, but carrying a big gun.

And she makes comments unprintable in a family newspaper, that reveal a sexual knowledge hugely inappropriate to her years.

Oh, and one of the male teenage characters acknowledges that he's attracted to her.

Now, children committing violent and sexual acts should be a matter for concern. Children carrying knives are not cool, but a real and present danger.

Underage sex isn't a laugh. Recent government figures revealed that in this country more than 8,000 children under the age of 16 conceive every year.

Worldwide child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry. In Africa and South America, brutalised youngsters who kill and rape are rightly feared as members of feral gangs or child soldiers.

Movies such as City Of God, Innocent Voices and Johnny Mad Dog have treated the issue with sensitivity.

But in Kick-Ass, childish violence of the most extreme kind - hacking off limbs, shootings in the mouth, impalings and fatal stabbings - is presented with calculated flippancy, as funny, admirable and (most perversely of all) sexually arousing.

The film-makers are sure to argue that there's nothing wrong with breaking down taboos of taste - but there are often good reasons for taboos.

Do we really want to live, for instance, in a culture when the torture and killing of a James Bulger or Damilola Taylor is re-enacted by child actors for laughs?

The people behind this grotesque glorification of prematurely sexualised, callously violent children know full well that they are going to make a lot of money, and they'll get an easy ride from the vast majority of reviewers, who either don't care about the social effects of movies or are frightened to appear ' moralistic' or 'judgmental'.

The truth is, of course, that all critics moralise and make judgments, whether they realise they are doing so or not. So please don't be misled. Kick-Ass is not the harmless fun it pretends to be.

Yes, it's lightweight and silly, but it's also cynical, premeditated and mindbogglingly irresponsible.

And in Hit-Girl, the film-makers have created one of the most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema."


Someone who fancies 11 year old girls would write these words. Sick fuckers.

kidsick5000

Somebody may want to check that Daily Mail journo's hard-drive. He seems to have a problem in seeing things that blatantly aren't there.

I caught this when I was out in Australia, and I think this is a film for those who like Action Movies, but can take or leave Comic Book flicks.

I think the pushing the envelope nature of the film stays faithful to Mark Miller's style. The criticial reaction to the film seems to reflect more on how Society has become increasingly warped. However at least the film gets us asking questions. Why can some of us see a 13 year old in a Schoolgirl Uniform as a 13 year old in a Schoolgirl Uniform, yet others see this seedy sexual overtone to something that is apparently innocent? Why was nobody bothered about the subtle homophobia? How can we the audience chuckle nonchalantly at violence, what is 'cool' about someone getting obliterated by a minigun or drug dealers and prostitutes getting brutally slaughtered?

Kick-Ass at least operates, and can be interpreted at many different levels, and like most modern Comic Book adaptations is actually intelligent and wonderfully grey, as opposed to the old days of goodies and baddies, when everything was black and white.

SavageHedgehog

Hmm, can't say I saw much in the way of shades-of-grey, other than I suppose possibly
Spoiler alert
the villain's son being occasionally sympathetic and/or likable
[close]
. It's entirely possible I missed something, I often do, but it struck me as pretty much being a goodies vs. baddies tale in the vein of West-era Batman or a Dick Tracy strip, but in a more modern cynical packaging which doesn't take its notions of "good" and "evil" seriously. At least, that's the level on which I enjoyed it.

Roger Ebert's given Kick-Ass a damning one-star review, and the two critics who now fill his old role on US TV also panned it. I don't really understand it but the film does seem to have offended a fair few non-crazy people.

mr. logic

Ebert:


Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find "Kick-Ass" morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

The movie's premise is that ordinary people, including a high school kid, the 11-year-old and her father, try to become superheroes in order to punish evil men. The flaw in this premise is that the little girl does become a superhero. In one scene, she faces a hallway jammed with heavily armed gangsters and shoots, stabs and kicks them all to death, while flying through the air with such power, it's enough to make Jackie Chan take out an AARP membership.

This isn't comic violence. These men, and many others in the film, are really stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children that age would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?

I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what? The movie's rated R, which means in this case that it's doubly attractive to anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I'm thinking of 6-year-olds. There are characters here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms, ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child's head, he is prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time, shoots him with bazooka shell at 10-foot range and blows him through a skyscraper window and across several city blocks of sky in a projectile of blood, flame and smoke. As I often read on the Internet: Hahahahaha.

The little girl is named Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz). She adopts the persona of Hit Girl. She has been trained by her father, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), to join him in the battle against a crime boss (Mark Strong). Her training includes being shot at point-blank range while wearing a bulletproof vest. She also masters the martial arts — more, I would say, than any other movie martial artist of any age I can recall. She's gifted with deadly knife-throwing; a foot-long knife was presented to her by Dad as, I guess, a graduation present.

Big Daddy and Mindy never have a chat about, you know, stuff like how when you kill people, they are really dead. This movie regards human beings like video-game targets. Kill one, and you score. They're dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie's home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.

Hit Girl teams up with Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson), the film's narrator, a lackluster high school kid who lives vicariously through comic books. For reasons tedious to explain, he orders a masked costume by mail order and sets about trying to behave as a superhero, which doesn't work out well. He lacks the training of a Big Daddy. But as he and Hit Girl find themselves fighting side by side, he turns into a quick learner. Also, you don't need to be great at hand-to-hand combat if you can just shoot people dead.

The early scenes give promise of an entirely different comedy. Aaron Johnson has a certain anti-charm, his problems in high school are engaging, and so on. A little later, I reflected that possibly only Nic Cage could seem to shoot a small girl point-blank and make it, well, funny. Say what you will about her character, but Chloe Grace Moretz has presence and appeal. Then the movie moved into dark, dark territory, and I grew sad.


I disagree with him on this one, but he's a fantastic reviewer isn't he?

El Unicornio, mang

He's a very good writer (his blog is fantastic), but I do find quite a lot of his reviews questionable and he seems overly sensitive about movie violence (he panned Wolf Creek mainly because of this). I guess it's just his opinions but he does seem out of touch quite a lot (see also his recent: "Video Games can never be art" blog where he writes about something he knows nothing about)

Johnny Textface

re: Ebert, he gave Fight Club the same rating as Batman and Robin.
Spoiler alert
The daft twat.
[close]

Jemble Fred

Indeed, Batman & Robin was very silly self-aware twaddle, rather than self-consciously cool hipster twaddle.

Me=

The Widow of Brid

I've still not seen this, but could someone who has seen the film and read the comic confirm (or deny) the impression I got from a recent conversation that
Spoiler alert
They've dropped the entire thing from the comic of Big Daddy having completely made up his back story to give his and Hit Girl's life purpose? Does that not change the point of the film - and particularly Hit Girl's character -  completely from the comic?
[close]

Johnny Textface

Quote from: Jemble Fred on April 20, 2010, 10:30:49 AM
Indeed, Batman & Robin was very silly self-aware twaddle, rather than self-consciously cool hipster twaddle.

Both twaddle for sure, but Fight Club was a far better film surely.


Jemble Fred

By popular acclaim, it has to be – I just despise the film personally, and got fished in, forgetaboutit etc. Pointless post.

I wouldn't voluntarily watch Batman & Robin again either, to be fair.

Jack Shaftoe

Widow of Brid - yes they have.

Spoiler alert
Which threw me for a big chunk of the film actually - as you suggest, it does rather lessen the impact upon Hit Girl of finding her whole upbringing is a lie.
[close]


madhair60

Brilliant review from Ebert there.

Someone sell this film to me, please.  Tell me it's not the abortion the trailers make it seem.

phes

^^ are you serious

madhair60

Yes.  Friends of mine have enjoyed the movie and recommended it, but rarely give reasons besides "yeah it's cool".

phes

the review, brilliant?

you've not seen the film.

madhair60

Yeah, it's a well-written review.  Is there a problem?

phes

No, no problem. I'm probably just being a little autistic.

madhair60

So, worth £8?  The Mail don't like it, which is a start.

Jack Shaftoe

Well I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wouldn't necessarily go and see it a second time to pick up all the nuances I missed, because I don't think I missed any, but it's entertaining, fast-paced, has interesting characters, makes really good use of music throughout, and takes the piss out of lots of comicbook film adaptations while still feeling like its own thing.

Johnny Textface

Yeah I agree with Jack Shaftoe, definately worth £8 of your cash. With regard to the music -
Spoiler alert
the use of the Elvis track had me smiling like a nutter for the remainder of the film.
[close]

phes

I went twice, the second time being the pinch, and yes it really is a decent film. I'm not a comic reader so I can't say how faithful it's been in that respect, but Chloe whatshername is fantastically accomplished and Cage is very good (I enjoyed his performance far more the second watch - probably just my mood). I'm afraid i'm no Ebert and really haven't thought especially deeply about the film. I didn't at any point think it was necessary. It was just great fun and surprising and really engaged the audience. I haven't sat in a film that really involved the audience quite that quickly and effectively for ages. I'm not quit sure where to put the film really because of the extreme violence, because otherwise I know I got the same buzz from it that I got from all those great Indy/BTTF/Ghostbusters etcs in the eighties.

Hank_Kingsley

Quote from: madhair60 on April 20, 2010, 11:22:26 AM
Brilliant review from Ebert there.

Someone sell this film to me, please.  Tell me it's not the abortion the trailers make it seem.
It's definitely not, I saw the trailers and thought it looked mega monster zero one gay but actually it was very funny.

I swear the trailer I saw had speeded up some of the hit girl footage and made it look all bullet time and shit because it was reassuringly good when I saw it in kino.

So, yeah tis good.