Kick-Ass movie discussion - Contains spoilers
 

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 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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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