Kick-Ass movie discussion - Contains spoilers

[Alex]

So my issue with being dishonest with its premise is pretty much along the lines of what mousepod said.

The initial premise is "what if normal people tried to be superheroes."

Then over the course of the movie:

1. In his very first attempt at superheroing our protagonist gets pummeled and run over by a car. All well and good, except for this beating leaves him with a superpower: he doesn't feel pain (and the movie seems to equate not feeling pain with not getting hurt when in the real world this is a very serious medical condition (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=1386322) because you still get injured you just don't know it. I'm not so much bothered by the misrepresentation of what not feeling pain means as by the fact that these are supposed to be normal people.

2. Then they make the B, bordering on A, story about two Batman level superheroes who are weapons and martial arts masters, even at 11 years old and in almost every way behave indistinguishably from superheroes.

3. Superhuman ability to continue functioning while on fire.

4. Super jetpack technology.

In the end, this isn't a movie showing "what if normal people tried to be superheroes" but rather "what if Batman and Robin had a geeky friend."

Then there's the inconsistency that Hit Girl takes out 8 guys with guns in a hallway and then 30 seconds later walks into a disabling roundhouse kick (not to mention she was going to sit there and die by bazooka without even using the grenades she had).

That said, I really enjoyed almost every moment Hit Girl and Big Daddy were on screen. I liked the set up of the "dweeb playing hero". But most of the middle was pointless and contradictory. The last act of the movie does not fit with the first. Hit Girl should have shot the GBF storyline in the face as an act of humanity.

[flippyshark]

I want to see the movie that really follows this premise to it's logical conclusion, mostly because I'm terminally bored with the superhero genre and would love to see it skewered and savaged, without mercy or affection. (not that I want the genre to disappear, but it's grown so mainstream and predictable, it's time for some puncturing.) I wasn't very keen on this movie, so i've read the spoilers, and now, well, it sounds like I would enjoy the original comic quite a bit.

[Moonliner]

I want to see the movie that really follows this premise to it's logical conclusion, mostly because I'm terminally bored with the superhero genre and would love to see it skewered and savaged, without mercy or affection. (not that I want the genre to disappear, but it's grown so mainstream and predictable, it's time for some puncturing.) I wasn't very keen on this movie, so i've read the spoilers, and now, well, it sounds like I would enjoy the original comic quite a bit.

Following the premise to it's logical conclusion would have the movie end at the "Run over by a car" part.

[flippyshark]

Following the premise to it's logical conclusion would have the movie end at the "Run over by a car" part.

Yeah, which is more or less what I want to see.

[innerSpaceman]

Well, I would agree with all of Alex's comments - except I see this as a comedy and NOT as a superhero movie. So when they posit real people being superheros - I don't take that literally, but as a story point to run a comedy riff from.

The answer, I think even given by his nerd friends, was that Batman had no superpowers. Then lo and behold, Big Daddy is practically Batman, proving that counterpoint. And demolishing the original point is when Kick-Ass himself is only able to continue as Kick-Ass precisely because he obtains a sort of super-power, but resulting from a car crash instead of a radioactive accident.

I saw this as a very knowing joke, and not in any way inconsistent with the set-up. It was the comedic pay-off of that set-up.

In a drama, that would be called a contradiction. In a comedy, it's called a joke.


(More later, I hope - really, insanely busy today)

[Alex]

As usual, it probably comes down to how well it is playing to you individually.

If I had been rolling in the seat then it probably wouldn't bother me. But I wasn't. I was amused at points but pretty much if Hit Girl wasn't on screen I found it all flat, comedically.

[mousepod]

I also agree with Alex's points in the first post of the thread. But I was never bored. And I thought that Nic Cage's Adam West impression when he was Big Daddy was brilliant. I only wish that they'd maintained the comic's idea of revealing his police backstory to be a fiction.

[Alex]

Really, you didn't watch him rubbing tanning lotion into his lust object while pretending to be gay boring and broad? I felt like the movie kept pausing to insert scenes from a lost Jason Biggs raunch comedy.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Big Daddy thing, but I can imagine that when adapting it, it might have been considered that it would make Hit Girl into a more tragic figure than she is. At least as it stands, regardless of how misguided Cage's raising of her was, it has a rational reason based in a real world goal and valid reason to fear the world. If it was all made up then he's just a horribly sick person doing terrible things to his daughter.

[innerSpaceman]

The whole Kick-Ass's alter-ego subplot was certainly the low mark of the movie. That said, while the play-gay thing was tired, it at least had a little more going for it than 6 other standard teen boy-gets-girl ploys they could have lifted from the playbook. There were a couple of funny lines involving that storyline, but yeah - it was relatively dull.

Again, since Kick-Ass was the classic audience entry point of normalcy to a world of weird, I accept that sort of thing. In truth, I'm rather tired of the widespread entertainment notion that the audience MUST have a straight-man entry point to project themselves into the story. I think that's bogus. But I certainly don't expect a comedy to break from that nearly-unbreakable norm of story-telling.

So yeah, more of Red Mist and Hit Girl/Big Daddy would have been better - but I don't think they were far off from the ideal balance. I would certainly have liked it if the Kick-Ass teen story had been better and funnier. But it gave me a chance to catch my breath.



As for the departure from the comic book - that could never have affected my enjoyment of the film - since I never read the comic. I'm glad I haven't. It's very difficult to enjoy the movie version of something you're already familiar with .... but much easier to enjoy the book or comic of a movie you've already seen.

So, in the comic, is there a counterpart of Big Daddy's old cop buddy who tries to warn him off vigilantiism and takes in Mindy (Hit Girl) in the end, so she's not orphaned?

[Bornieo: Fully Loaded]

In the comic Hit Girl goes back to her Mother who has been searching for her. I'm surpised its not in the film.

[innerSpaceman]

Well, since the film makes avenging her mother's death Hit-Girl's entire motive, I don't see how they could have. I also think we might have started thinking less of Hit Girl if she was motivated merely by crime-fighting. She is quite the brutal 11-year-old adorable killing machine.

[Alex]

Hit Girl is motivated by her father's warped parenting. Big Daddy was motivated by revenge for her mother but I already think nothing good about him as a person (accepting that the idea of him is cool in a warped comic book sensibility).

[Moonliner]

Yeah, which is more or less what I want to see.

This one is for you Flippy:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/outbreak.png

[innerSpaceman]

BTW, I don't agree that Hit-Girl was motivated by her dad's warped upbringing. Again, A COMEDY. Not a realistic portrayal of a dangerous and dysfunctional upbringing (that so many absurd critics are claiming).

So I saw her motivation as shared with her dad to avenge her mom, and also later to avenge her dad - but continuing their shared mission to avenge her mom.

[wendybeth]

Just a side note- I haven't seen this movie yet- but my little nephew Utah has CIPA. Keeps his mom on her toes, that's for sure. It doesn't help that he's fearless (never feeling pain can do that for you) and probably ADD or ADHD just a tad bit.... she has her hands full.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Hooray for DVD release.

So, regardless of whether you tell me it's a comedy or a serious comic book movie, all I can say is that by the end of the film I was definitely feeling meh about the whole thing.

That's saying a lot since I loved the gory action, the teenager stuff, and Kick Ass himself. Even the setups for some of the stuff that ended weakly - Red Mist's crime family, Big Daddy's Adam West fetish - were great. Something went really wrong along the way.

As soon as I started to think about it after the film I realized that Big Daddy's character completely unnerved me. He's supposed to be a hero? At best, he's a man driven insane by circumstances and has raised his daughter to be a demon for his own purposes...and at best, my reaction is one of sadness. Sure, during the action it's pretty awesome, but in truth the character left a bad taste in my mouth. By the time he's burning and his daughter is continuing to slaughter people I just wanted to turn away. I'd equate it to the uneasy feeling I got while watching the protagonist of The Hurt Locker having sh.tty interactions with his wife and child after being scarred by war. It's just a bummer.

Agreed with the above that they completely belie the "normal guy as superhero" concept and if their intent was to show that no, a normal guy can't be a superhero, they did a poor job of it.

Like I said I really dug most of it and was disappointed that it fell apart at the end. I love Christopher Mintz-Plasse as a foil and hoped for more villian-ness by the end. After he tried to save Kick-Ass and then watched the crap get beat out of him I hoped for more of an emotional reaction, or at least, a bit of emotion when his father dies. The end shot had the wrong beat, much like the rest of the film.

Oh well - here's hoping Scott Pilgrim is better.

[Ghoulish Delight]

As for the departure from the comic book - that could never have affected my enjoyment of the film - since I never read the comic. I'm glad I haven't. It's very difficult to enjoy the movie version of something you're already familiar with .... but much easier to enjoy the book or comic of a movie you've already seen.I never read the comic either, but I thought the movie suffered from the same thing a lot of comic adaptations suffer from (Watchmen come to mind) - story compression. I could tell that there was a LOT left out for the sake of time. We saw Kick-Ass take out 1 set of street thugs, and the BAM, smack in the middle of taking down an organized crime boss. As CP pointed out, Red Mist went from sympathetic to Kick-Ass and feeling betrayed by his father - to happily jumping up to run interference while his father tried to kill a little girl with nothing in between to change that. Clearly large chunks of action and motivation were missing that would have been in the comic book. That bugged me through most of the movie, making everything feel rushed and disjointed.

And I was kinda put off by the gore. I'm not as a rule put off by over the top comic book gore (for example, I LOVED Kill Bill Vol. 1), but in this context it felt over done and unnecessary.

[innerSpaceman]

Funny you should mention Watchman as an example of story compression. I, too, felt there was something seriously "missing" from that film ... but when I read the comic afterwards, I was surprised to find that - up until the octopus creature at the very end, if was pretty much filmed frame by frame - with barely one or two scenes left out of the film.

It just hit the wrong note with me, I guess. And Kick Ass just hit the right ones for me. Obviously YMMV, and that's cool - and more and more understandable as I am exposed to more varied reactions to the film.