Another Summer filled with Comic Book-based characters is upon us: Iron Man 2, Jonah Hex and Scott Pilgrim readily come to mind. Seems Hollywood will stay fixated on the obscure franchises because nothing seems certain regarding the more accessible characters: Batman is unknown, Spider-Man is getting rebooted/revamped, no idea about the rest and at times I have a hard time caring, I think DC’s line of direct-to-DVD movies are superior, namely New Frontier and the recent Crisis on Two Earths, both of which I failed to get off my butt to write about. Meanwhile, we had a Sunday afternoon free to see this attempt by Marvel to do an R-rated superhero movie.
You’ve seen the trailers and commercials, Dave wants to be a superhero but he lives in the real world, powers don’t exits, blah blah blah. He makes a costume out of a SCUBA wet-suit, calls himself Kick-Ass, tries to take on gangs, runs into a real dangerous duo: Big Daddy and Hit Girl, gets tangled up with The Outfit, so on and so forth.
The whole difference between this dreck and say Hero at Large (starring John Ritter, Bert Convy and Anne Archer) or the funnier Mystery Men from 11 years ago, would be the gore. Everything is predictable, telegraphed and contrived. Slathering this in blood, CG-generated amputations performed by an adolescent murder machine and Nicolas Cage doing his best Adam West imitation, doesn’t suddenly make this edgy or original. These additions only make it more appealing to tweeners and teens who enjoy violence for the sake of violence, like when I was kid and thought seeing Rollerball unedited on HBO rocked. It’s hard to believe there’s a sequel in the works.
Now in the film’s defense, I readily admit to not ever reading the original comic book but I am dead certain that I have even less interest to check out the source material. Kick-Ass does illustrate an even more vivid argument I once heard from a comic-book store owner back in the Nineties about how Marvel tries to imitate DC’s more cerebral titles yet falls flat. Twenty years ago, Sandman was a big success with a more literate crowd, especially in the Goth-pre-Hot Topic circles. It was one of the titles DC used to launch its more adult-oriented Vertigo line (still around today oddly) to widen the audience. Marvel didn’t ignore this and countered with Sleepwalker thereby missing the mark entirely. Hence the cliche in comics I’ve heard for years, “You start out with Marvel and you grow up or graduate to DC.” How does this relate to Kick-Ass? It’s Marvel’s sad attempt to have their movie equivalent of Watchmen, another R-rated superhero franchise Hollywood was iffy on making.
Worth Seeing? Only if you’re a fan of the original Millar & Romita comic…I guess. I’m sure there are many modifications for time and to simplify it for general audiences which will get nitpicked. Everybody else, I would recommend not bothering. It isn’t very funny, it isn’t very entertaining and it doesn’t really put a new perspective on the genre as Watchmen did. I would give Mystery Men another shot or find the good superhero flicks of the last 40 years, the director’s cut of Superman II is my top recommendation yet you need to watch Superman first to get the best results.