Movie Review Kickass

Movie Review: Kickass

An interesting thing happened with this one. As some of you know, Nita and I have sold the Las Vegas house and are relocating to upstate NY in July. Friday was the day the movers came and Nita had gone to SLC to babysit grandkids while their parents flew to ash-covered England to defend his dissertation, so I was alone. Even Frankie the trans-gender cat had flown to NY. It had been a busy, taxing, emotionally-trying and physically demanding two months and the end was suddenly in sight. I was experiencing a strange mix of emotions and with an empty house on my hands (no comfy-chair, no television) I decided to go to a movie. I chose The Losers, a PG-13 action formulaic thing. But when I got to the theater that movie had flown my consciousness and when I saw Kickass on the board it somehow clicked that I had intended to see that one instead. Don’t ask me why. I knew a little about it from a review I’d read and had no intention of seeing it. It was rated R and admitted to very strong language.
So I watched all the trailers (my favorite part) and was shocked and confused when Kickass started and not the movie I thought I was seeing, the title of which was escaping me. So that’s why I’m reviewing Kickass.

A little background. This movie is based on an underground comic (which I did not know and is always a warning flag), or “graphic novel” as the wanna-be writers and artists prefer they be called. Ostensibly it is about a 17 year old boy, a non-entity, who—like virtually all teenage boys—fantasizes of being a super-hero (among other things.) He discusses the idea with his two non-entity friends as he stares longingly at “the girl” who is an unobtainable beauty several casts above his own motley station. Except he decides to do something about it and orders a costume online. So far we have a fairly mainstream coming-of-age story. But then we switch scenes to a mob boss and his model family life. Someone who looked like Batman has beaten up a couple of his drug mules. Then we switch to an idyllic father-daughter scene, he middle-aged and she 12 or 13 and smallish, pony tails and big eyes and wearing, interestingly enough, a bullet proof vest. They exchange endearments. She asks if it’s going to hurt. He smiles and says yes, about like falling off a bike and shoots her in the chest with a large handgun. She falls down, he helps her up and asks what she wants for her birthday. Her answer? A Balisong—one of those Pilipino knives that have two hinged hilts and can swivel around like a hooker-loose can opener. He gives her a matching set.
Back to the boy. He is in his costume, has named himself Kickass, and is out prowling the streets looking for bad guys. Mind you, he has no training whatsoever, is not strong—is not even particularly bright. And is pretty much a coward. He is living the fantasy though. He gets the crap kicked out of him. He does it again and 3 thugs put him in the hospital for 6 months, during which half his skeleton is enhanced with metal. The x-rays look like Wolverine. The result, which we might think magically turns him into a one-man crime fighting wave, only serves to make him able to take a beating for longer periods of time.
Now the plot thickens. The father daughter team are actual crime fighters on a vendetta against the mob boss. It’s a long story. The dad (Nickolas Cage) is insane but functional and has been training himself and his daughter for her entire life to one end—killing everyone involved in his pregnant wife’s suicide. They are killing people wholesale—brutally, heartlessly and with ruthless efficiency (one of the four main tools of the Spanish Inquisition). All of which gets blamed on the ineffectual Kickass.
Enough. The movie takes a strange twist at that point and becomes a blood fest. I would compare the violence and gore with Reservoir Dogs. That’s right. If you don’t know what that means, count your blessings and make sure you never find out.
We go from teenage angst to deadly serious comic levels of mayhem, all the while maintaining the original level of familial repartee and comic-bookish writing. And somehow, it all works. It is, on several levels, a good movie—in the sense that it is well done. The language is unbelievably profane. The killing is rampant, über violent and graphic, and the vengeance is never justified. It’s as if Some Kind of Wonderful meets Napoleon Dynamite meets the afore mentioned Reservoir Dogs meets Goodfellas.
I do not recommend this one in the strongest of tones. Some of you will definitely want to see it and you know who you are. The fight scenes are wild and wooly, the little girl is a human dynamo with a filthy mouth, able to take out a dozen grown, hardened thugs without breaking a sweat—and she doesn’t just knock them out—she turns them into hamburger. Her outfit is eclectic to say the least and her moniker—Hit Girl—appropriate.
Every single character in this film is a broken, emotionally stunted, irretrievably disturbed person.
But the action is intense, viscerally exciting and unending. There’s a lot of misplaced creativity in it. Rated R for strong language and violence beyond the pale.