{"id":289,"date":"2010-04-16T11:01:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T10:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=289"},"modified":"2010-04-16T11:01:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-16T10:01:07","slug":"kick-ass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=289","title":{"rendered":"Kick-Ass"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Kick-Ass<\/em> movie opens in America tonight.\u00a0 It’s been out in Britain for a couple of weeks, and I went to see it yesterday.\u00a0 Largely, to be honest, because it’s the sort of film I’m obliged to have an opinion about, so it might as well be an informed one.<\/p>\n

And do you know what?\u00a0 It’s good.\u00a0 It’s really good.<\/p>\n

As you must surely know by now, the basic idea goes like this.\u00a0 Teenage boy decides to become a superhero, despite completely lacking any qualifications for the job other than good intentions and a willingness to wear stupid clothes in public.\u00a0 More by luck than talent, he ends up crossing paths with actual bad guys and proper vigilantes.\u00a0 Beyond that… well, they’ve changed the plot somewhat from the comic, though they’ve stuck to the same basic story.\u00a0 But I won’t go into the spoilers.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting, if you compare the synopses of the comic and the film, is that the film has actually reined in Millar’s more egregious tendencies.\u00a0 This probably doesn’t come across from reading the reviews.\u00a0 But the film has dialled back the levels of cynical nihilism from “prohibitively toxic” to merely “black comedy.”\u00a0 So the film, for example, is much more willing to embrace Big Daddy and Hit-Girl as real, proper superheroes inexplicably bleeding into Kick-Ass’s otherwise more-or-less real world.\u00a0 It resists the temptation to undercut them.\u00a0 It just goes with the idea that an eleven-year-old ninja is inherently cool.\u00a0 And because<\/em> they’ve somehow migrated into Kick-Ass’s world from a different film, their total lack of realism ceases to be a problem.<\/p>\n

Once you get rid of those bits in Mark Millar’s writing that make you roll your eyes and go “Oh, Mark…”, and once you impose a bit more structure on what remains, you end up with a really entertaining film.\u00a0 (By the way, the film does manage to include John Romita Jr’s art as the basis for Big Daddy’s animated origin sequence.)<\/p>\n

And yes, Chloe Moretz and Nicolas Cage are excellent as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy.\u00a0 They’re the best thing in the film.<\/p>\n

Now, you can argue that the film doesn’t work as a satire because it’s still trying to have it both ways – being a superhero is manifestly unworkable and incredibly cool at the same time.\u00a0 The result is moral bankruptcy, albeit ironic.\u00a0 There’s a lot of truth to that criticism.\u00a0 Frankly, the film is entertaining enough that it doesn’t matter whether it has a coherent worldview to offer.\u00a0 But I think it works because<\/em> we’re never asked to accept the two genuine vigilantes as remotely realistic.\u00a0 They’re don’t belong in the real world (which isn’t really <\/em>the real world, of course, but which otherwise plays by the rules of black comedy rather than John Woo movies) and the story warps to accommodate them.\u00a0 It’s funny because it’s a collision of elements that don’t belong in the same film. \u00a0Is this making a point?\u00a0 Probably not, but it’s an enjoyable thing to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Kick-Ass movie opens in America tonight.\u00a0 It’s been out in Britain for a couple of weeks, and I went to see it yesterday.\u00a0 Largely, to be honest, because it’s the sort of film I’m obliged to have an opinion about, so it might as well be an informed one. And do you know what?\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}