The critical debate and the bratty pleasures of Kick-Ass

After enjoying the subversive treatment of comic book movie conventions in Kick-Ass, I've been struck by the ferocity of the critical denunciations against the movie, notably Roger Ebert's:

"The movie's premise is that ordinary people, including a high school kid, the 11-year-old and her father, try to become superheroes in order to punish evil men. The flaw in this premise is that the little girl does become a superhero. In one scene, she faces a hallway jammed with heavily armed gangsters and shoots, stabs and kicks them all to death, while flying through the air with such power, it's enough to make Jackie Chan take out an AARP membership.

This isn't comic violence. These men, and many others in the film, are really stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children that age would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?"

Writing for The New York Times, A. O. Scott takes a more balanced but similar view in "Brutal Truths About Violence":

“I Spit on Your Grave” deliberately placed itself on the far margin of acceptability, and like other disreputable movies that go on to attract a cult following, it has a certain transgressive, contrarian energy. You watch it — if you can stand to — with the feeling that you are participating in something forbidden, perhaps dangerous, which makes viewing it feel vaguely like defying authority.

But “Kick-Ass,” a thoroughly mainstream entertainment, carries no such thrill. Everybody can share in the bloodlust, and enjoy the kinetic choreography of flying bullets and spurting arteries. It’s all in good fun, it’s all kid’s stuff, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s the conventional wisdom, in any case, which silences ethical objections to, let’s say, the idea of showing a child’s battered face as being in some way audacious. We will, I suppose, each find our own limits and draw our own boundaries, but it may also be time to articulate those and say when enough is enough."

In reply, Jane Goldman, one of the screenwriters of the film, has this to say:

"I think certainly my attitude, which is one shared by the director Matthew Vaughn is that we really want to be true to the story [the comic written by Mark Millar]. Because that’s what spoke to us about it, not the fact that, well I never saw it as a deliberately provocative story, but I think Hit-Girl is an interesting character because she’s so young. And if you were suddenly to say ‘how can we make this family friendly and get a different rating’ it would have been a completely different story than the one we were interested in telling. It was always our agenda to tell a story for adults. Some of the feedback from studios when we initially took this around was ‘oh could she be 18 years old’ but that to me would have been distasteful because suddenly it’s a sexualized girls and guns kind of bollocks and that’s not a story we’re interested in telling. She’s meant to be a proper anti-hero and that’s what was cool, that she’s at an age pre-sexualization. And that’s why people find it threatening. It’s sadly the only way you can make a non-sexualized bad ass female antihero, she has to be prepubescent."

For NYT, Manohla Dargis has a more mixed reaction:

"Ms. Moretz certainly walks the walk and jumps the jump, loading a new gun in midrun like a baby Terminator. But as her deployment of a four-letter slur for women indicates, and as the cop-out last blowout only underscores, Hit-Girl isn’t a wee Wonder Woman. She’s not even a latter-day Lara Croft, who, however absurd, works on screen because of Ms. Jolie’s own outsize persona. A supergimmick, Hit-Girl by contrast is a heroine for these movie times: a vision of female might whittled down to pocketsize."

In The Huffington Post, Melissa Silverstein also had mixed thoughts:

"The question I've been asking myself since I saw the film: does Hit Girl move us forward or backwards? I don't really have a final answer. The pros are that she is actually the hero of the film. She saves everyone and kills all the bad guys. The last time I saw that was...well...never. The actress who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz, wanted to play an Angelina Jolie type action role. This is the type of part she told her agents to find according to a story in the NY Times: "You know, like an action hero, woman empowerment, awesome, take-charge leading role." It warms my heart that a young actress is interested in playing these kinds of parts; that she wants to, for lack of a better word, kick ass, is cool. Also, the fact that all these guys are destroyed by a girl never becomes an issue. There's no sexist bullshit about guys being killed by a girl. She comes and wreaks havoc and all these guys want to do is survive."

Writing for /Film, David Chen had this to say about Kick-Ass' brand of superhero violence:

"Based on what I’ve read about Millar’s intentions for the comic book, I think he was trying to comment on the ridiculousness of the superhero concept. The idea that normal, everyday people might don costumes and try to take on criminals is, on its face, fairly ludicrous. Those that actually do this may suffer from dementia, amorality, delusions, or all of the above. Millar simply takes that idea to its logical extreme. While the violence in the film is brutal, it’s so over-the-top that it’s clear Vaughn wants us not just to revel in the violence itself, but in the fact of its excess. If people actually became “superheroes” in real life and were exceedingly good at it, it wouldn’t be glamorous; it would be extremely messy, unrewarding, and probably very disturbing."

For Film School Rejects, writer/director of Kick-Ass Matthew Vaughn had this to say:

One of the main reasons I did Kick-Ass was I was just like, you know, the comic movies, the superhero films I’ve been watching, the superheroes are old! You know, Batman is from the ‘30s, and Superman ‘30s, and Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, they are from the ‘60s, watched them in the ‘80s. And I just thought, “Gosh. Where is our modern-day superhero film? Where is our sort of post-modern look at all the movies that we all love?” I just felt too many of these films were regurgitating the same idea, so they are just not relevant to modern life in any shape or form. So I wanted to make a movie that I think kids are going to relate to.

And we had unbelievably great reviews in England. And the harshest critic — I was terrified to read his reviews — said the thing that made me…I’ve never been so proud of a review because he described the movie as being the Clockwork Orange of this generation. And when I heard that, I was just like "Cool." That's exactly what I wanted.

I just felt like, “Where have the edgy, cool movies gone?” You know, what happened? I think the film industry has just grounded them out of the environment. One of the main reasons I did Kick-Ass was I was just like, you know, the comic District 9 was brilliant and one of the few films which I really, really enjoyed last year. And I said, "Look, I want to continue that vibe."

So, is Kick-Ass edgy or depraved, "cool" or sick, a film worthy of being grouped in with calculated outrage of A Clockwork Orange or one that will, as Ebert suggests, lead to "kids in the age range of this movie's home video audience . . . shooting one another every day in America"?

While I had problems with the Kick-Ass' adherence to the comic book movie cliches (the adolescent wish-fulfillment, generic bad guys, the loud costumes, torture scenes, the obvious preparation for the sequel, etc.), I liked the way the film plays with audience expectations. For instance, in the opening scene, a man in a winged superhero outfit jumps off of a skyscraper. As he tries to fly, a crowd down below applauds his "heroism" until he crashes into the hood of a car and dies. Then, the voiceover (Dave) says "That's not me. That's some Armenian guy with mental health problems." In this way the makers of Kick-Ass mock the knee-jerk desire to look upon a costumed crusader as a hero. And I wonder how much that bratty impulse to lampoon that veneration might in part be one reason for all of the critical scorn of the film.

By updating and messing with the concept of the superhero, Mark Millar and Matthew Vaughn have radicalized the genre. As Ben Child points out, how will all of the upcoming superhero films look, all of the Captain Americas, the Avengers, the Green Hornet, Iron Man 2, Silver Surfer, Ant Man, Venom etc., etc.? Will they now look dated in comparison? I get royally sick of Knock'm Sock'm manly super power-filled showdowns in films like Iron-Man and The Hulk, all of the roars of the "wild" in films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolfman that serve to further emphasize just how domesticated we've all become. The makers of Kick-Ass at least resist the conventions much as Hit Girl takes on an entire criminal organization singlehandedly, and in doing so has created something new. The critical debate attests to that.

Related link:

The art of Kick-Ass