I was intrigued by the idea of Kick Ass, till I read Ebert’s review that called it “morally reprehensible.” His review contained things that made me think, “I wouldn’t like this movie.” Then a lot of people twittered about how great it was, I got an email about how great it was, and then an invitation to see it. So we went.

Mary walked out 20 minutes in. I stayed. Perhaps because I wanted to write this post having seen the whole thing.

Ebert was right. I think “morally reprehensible” is about right.

Watch an 11 year old girl get punched in the face. Watch her father shoot her in the chest at close range (she’s wearing a bulletproof vest) so she knows what it feels like. Watch a 16 year old buy get knifed by a goon. Watch the 11 year old girl kill people without mercy. She’s a sociopathic killer, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Everyone who hasn’t seen the movie will read the above paragraph and go “oh my god, why would anyone like this film?!” People who saw the film, and liked it, will say “but it wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously. It was a comic book movie. More than that, it was part-send up of a comic book movie.”

And this is essentially the heart of the question: tone. It’s not that a movie with these elements can’t be good. It’s that it’s so wrong about how it presents them.

 

The film has a tongue firmly in its cheek. And it knows how to create likable characters and set up jokes. In fact the 11 year old “Hit Girl” is pretty likable, as is the 16 year old “Kick Ass.” In fact, the cast in general is likable. The villain chews the scenery well, the heroes have good one liners, and the movie is well shot.

But it’s still awful.

1) Violence in Movies

I like movies. I like violent movies. I think Inglourious Basterds was probably the best film I saw last year. So it’s not the violence. It’s how you treat the violence.

Some movies, especially action movies, have expendable violence. James Bond kills a henchman, and it doesn’t faze you. John Woo stages an elaborate gun battle and victims fall all over the place.

Some movies have cartoony violence. Uma Thurman cuts off the arm of a henchman and it spews blood as if it were a hose under pressure. It’s funny.

Some movies have real violence, where you’re meant to feel it’s impact, to feel its horror. Inglourious Basterds had this at times. Some Oscar style dramas have this. The most emotionally violent scene I think I’ve seen is in The Talent Mr. Ripley when Matt Damon clocks Jude Law upside the head with an oar. It’s brutal.

Kick Ass fails because it wants both expendable and cartoony violence, but the filmmakers aren’t good enough to not make you feel its impact. So it’s got the tone right, but you still can’t get past the fact that it’s an 11 year old girl you’re watching getting punched.

The closest thing I think I’ve seen to this recently would be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I generally liked the movie, except the scene where Brad Pitt is kicking Angelina Jolie repeatedly in the gut, and it’s played for laughs (as much of Kick Ass is). It’s filmed to be funny, but since it’s more personal than when they were just throwing knives and grenades at each other, it’s not funny. It’s a guy kicking his wife repeatedly in the gut.

Thought experiment: think of a movie where a rape scene were tried to be filmed tongue in cheek. Could you do it? God I hope not, because the act your filming is just too personal and awful. Give Jamie Lee Curtis a uzi in True Lies and let her mow down faceless henchmen and you’ve removed enough that it can become very funny. Violence can be funny, in certain situations. But you have to give the audience the release to laugh.

2) Comic Book Heroes

Hit Girl sucks as a comic book hero. She’s got no code. Take a scene where Kick Ass shows up to warn off a guy bugging his girlfriend. That’s pretty heroic. Except the guy is also a drug dealer, and that puts him on Hit Girl’s list. She shows up, saves the life of Kick Ass, and then proceeds to murder everyone there and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from them.

“Murder?” you say? “Isn’t that a little hard?” Certainly they’re bad guys. Most of them have guns and they are aimed at Hit Girl. So we’ll call 95% of them self-defense. But take the gangster’s moll. The woman sees Hit Girl kill everyone in the room. She breaks a bottle and waves it at Hit Girl from across the room. Hit Girl has her superhero-style line “So you want to play.” Gangster’s Moll realizes it’s a bad idea (duh.) and she runs away. She runs away, gets caught at the door, and gets two samurai swords thrown through her midsection. Really? How is that a heroic action for Hit Girl? How can we possibly like someone who does that?

Kick Ass, when he shows up, says “I’m warning you, stay away from Katie, or else.” He tells the goons “I’m giving you this chance to walk away (from the car they’re jacking) and forget this happened.” It’s funny, because he’s not threatening at all. But it’s also pretty noble of him. Kick Ass is a hero, Hit Girl is an assassin.

Maybe it’s a “comic book movie,” but that doesn’t mean you get to lose human decency. In fact, the vast majority of comic book heroes have an overwhelming sense of human decency. Even the ones who are on the edge (Punisher, Wolverine, etc) have certain codes they live by.

3) The “It’s a parody” Argument

The movie wants this both ways, and some movies can get away with being both a loving send-up of their genre while being a great example of their genre as well. I’m thinking of Galaxy Quest for example, which is a great send-up of Star-Trek and yet stands independently as well. I’m thinking of actually a lot of comedies that can both be outrageous but also sincere. You can do both.

Again, Kick Ass fails here.

On the one hand, the movie starts as a pretty good example of what would happen if real people decided to become superheroes. One guy with wings jumps off a building and smashes into a taxi. It’s pretty funny, and it sets the tone for the movie.

But later, when Kick Ass gets knifed by the goons, we’ve gotten to know him as a funny, witty, lovable teen. Imagine Ferris Bueller suddenly getting knifed on his day off. It’s awful, and it feels like that. But then to have it played for laughs when shortly after that he gets hit by the car (I swear, I’m not making this up). The truth is, getting hit by a car in a movie can be so unexpected it makes you laugh (Meet Joe Black anyone?) but here again, we care way too much about this kid.

Putting the hero in real danger, real shocking danger, makes it way too hard to laugh at him, which is what we are supposed to do (we’re certainly not laughing with him). Putting characters we like in danger makes us care for them. So how can we laugh, even when the movie is giving us all the cues that we are supposed to?

And that’s the problem: the movie isn’t actually aware enough to know that what it’s showing is wrong. Or, it hasn’t provided the moral framework to allow it to be right. (Many movies and TV shows do this, of course. The only reason you can sympathize with Tony Soprano as a hero is that he is the most likable character on the show. Everyone else is so annoying and awful that we’re rooting for the only one who we can stand.)

But we can’t get there. Kick Ass could have had all the same scenes and been a good movie (possibly even great) if it had the right tone. We could have watched a tragedy, where a vengeful father begins training his daughter at 5 years old to become an assassin. We could have watched her become a shell of a human being at 11, nothing more than a killing machine with no moral code and no sense of decency. We could have watched a 16 year old boy trying to be a hero and getting the life beaten out of him for his troubles, never realizing how mistaken and sad he is–a movie that exposes our belief in heroes, super or otherwise (“Watchmen,” the comic book, does this quite well). But that’s not the movie we get.

… so after all of that, we’re still left with a sociopathic 11 year-old getting punched in the face and shot in the chest by her father. For all the reasons above, it doesn’t work.

The closest movie I can think of where we can handle this kind of thing is The Professional. It knows the line it walks, dealing with youth and violence. It delights in getting close to it, teasing you. But it never steps over. Or take Kill Bill, which shoots the back story of Oren Ishii in anime style, thus reducing the vicious impact of what we’re seeing.

So it can be done. But this movie is definitely not it.

I can’t in any way recommend it.