Sucks-Ass

So I finally got around to seeing Kick-Ass. You know, the "daring, subversive" movie from earlier this year that turned the superhero genre on its head? No? With the brilliant deconstruction of the superhuman do-gooder psyche, exploring the question, "What if REAL PEOPLE became superheroes?" Still nothing? How about the one with the 10-year-old purple-haired girl who dices thugs to bits after calling them fuckin' cunts?

Yeah, that's the one.

I'll admit, for roughly the first half of Kick-Ass, I was enjoying myself. It appeared to be a comedic take on Watchmen, a satire exposing the inherent ridiculous nature of the superhero fantasy. It totally lacked Watchmen's intellectual conceits, mature characterizations, and overall sense of hopelessness, appropriately enough for a comedy. When Nicolas Cage shoots his daughter point blank as a lesson in taking a bullet, it was so absurd that I genuinely laughed. At this point, the film worked. Nothing great, per se, but certainly entertaining.

But when director Matthew Vaughn forces us to endure watching two of our heroes being tortured to death, the laughs stopped. Now, as Hit Girl is blasting viscera all over the place, we're not to root for her out of a sense of wild abandon but rather genuine empathy. What was once satire is now a dark, bloody revenge flick; what was once reversing genre tropes was now stooping to their use. The film had lost me in its final hour, a constant "You have got to be kidding me!" buzzing around in my brain.

There's nothing original about Kick-Ass. It's superhero thematics are well-worn territory between the aforementioned Watchmen, The Incredibles, and probably a billion other properties that I'm not even aware of; the public has had the genre jammed down its collective throat over the past decade. There's nothing brilliant about it either; a couple of cracks about teen heroic fantasies, superheroes on MySpace, a thug obsessed with a bazooka -- enough comedy to sustain a decent SNL sketch or two, perhaps, but not to justify an entire motion picture's existence. And Hit-Girl? I suppose it is subversive in this day and age of oversensitivity to feature a 10-year-old sociopath swearing up a storm and blowing people to bits, but it certainly isn't brilliant. It's CHEAP. Shock humor, plain and simple, with all the substance of an awkward fart joke.

As someone who considers himself a nerd, it shames me that so many others in my demographic believe this to be a masterful work of art. It's pandering crap, the celluloid "geek" equivalent to a crusty tissue discarded in a garbage bin. What little promise it held was squandered the instant the film revealed it had nothing of substance to offer, falling back on the genre standards that it had promised to upend with a calculated dose of cheap controversy. Perhaps it is a sad state of affairs that this was far from the worst film I've seen this year, but I am truly ashamed that apparently I am supposed to enjoy something as crass and shallow as that which Kick-Ass devolves into during its second half.

You want ultra-violence? Watch Kill Bill Vol. 1. You want a worthwhile deconstruction of superhero tropes? See (or better yet, read) Watchmen, or, for a comedic bent, James Gunn's The Specials. Kids behaving badly? Stand By Me. But don't praise something as crude and shallow as Kick-Ass and then, when it underperforms, declare that its brilliance went above the heads of the general public, because I assure you that it didn't. There's no more brilliance here than in your average rom-com. Kick-Ass didn't kick ass because, well, it sucked.