04-22-10 Movie Review:  Kick-Ass

Just two noncommercial movies to announce, both tomorrow night. The first is the start of a new series, at least one new to me, the Arabian Nights Lecture Series at Saphira’s Center for World Dance, 2919 E. Kellogg Drive, which tomorrow at 7 is showing Tamr Henna, a 1957 Egyptian movie about a bellydancer and her class-threatre with introduction by Saphira Zeki herself; that’s tomorrow at 7, Saphira’s Center for World Dance, 2919 East Kellogg Drive, just south of Kellogg itself. And half an hour later, the usual Friday night Murdock Theatre movie at 536 North Broadway will be Run Lola Run, from Germany 1998, a rather experimental thriller with three different suggestions as to what went on, notable for its visuals, supposedly, more than for its plot.

And commercially, we have a rather peculiar movie that may have been intended to be more satirical than it is in Kick-Ass.

Kick-Ass certainly starts out looking like some kind of satire, as a seventeen-year-old social failure decides to become a costumed hero like the ones in the comic books despite that he has no remarkable powers except an incredible ability to take a beating, and he doesn’t know about that. And right away, the movie is in trouble. Satire is usually based on exaggeration, and director Matthew Vaughn doesn’t seem to know any other way. But you can’t exaggerate the violence of comic-book action movies like Watchman, which ends with the deaths of 15 million people, or the sheer sadism of movies like the Saw series, which have people carving our their own eyes; and the martial arts of costumed superheroes are just about as impossible to overdo; and if your hero is to survive such savage maulings, he clearly has superhuman powers no matter what he and you claim. By starting out trying to parody these problems, Kick-Ass starts out with such unattractive injuries as pretty well kill the comedy with unsuitable realism, and before it is over, we have fairly lingering footage of a man being burned alive. Current movie audiences may be hardened to this kind of thing, but I’m not, and in any case, excess brutality does not show much imagination or distinguish Kick-Ass from the genre it may be intended to make fun of.

Our heroine is an even younger girl, maybe twelve at the oldest, who could work of the Cirque de Soliel but tends to rely on weapons, and she doesn’t get beat up as much, but enough. Nicolas Cage plays her father, a real costumed superhero who does remarkably little of the dirty work himself and whose mission is not such as to account for this old hesitance. And there’s another juvenile costumer who is more acceptably comic, but he doesn’t do much either.

There are some touches of what might have led to comedy or satire, such as copy wannabes and problems of secret identities. But on the whole, Kick-Ass doesn’t seem to have involved anybody who understood comedy or satire very much, and ends up as just an unusually unrealistic attempt at whatever it was intended to satirize.