Kick-Ass has been hotly debated since the trailer debuted, featuring 11-year-old assassin Hit Girl calling bad guys “cunts.” Critics still disagree about her character, but say the film may do for superhero movies what Pulp Fiction did for crime films.
Though Hit Girl has gotten all the attention, she isn’t actually the star. The film, which opens today, is about Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), an average comic book nerd who buys a wetsuit on the Internet and starts fighting crime. He winds up in the hospital, but video of one of his altercations goes viral on YouTube. He starts doing freelance crime fighting, but discovers he isn’t the only amateur superhero in New York City. Former cop Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter Mindy (Chloë Grace Moretz) have transformed themselves into the costumed vigilantes Big Daddy and Hit Girl to take on a mob boss (Mark Strong) who framed Macready years ago. The mob boss’ son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is also posing as Red Mist, Hit Girl’s arch-nemesis.
The meaning of Hit Girl’s character, and the fact that Moretz was only 11 during filming, was the focus of most reviews, but critics were generally more concerned by the extreme acts of violence she commits than her cursing. The film features gratuitous Kill Bill-style violence: “human bodies are microwaved, crushed in trash compactors, skewered, bazookaed, and burned alive.” While the Macready’s have a “genuinely touching” father-daughter relationship, they are never shown discussing the consequences of violence. Hit Girl is unaffected by what she does, and one critic remarked that, Moretz is “still playing dress-up, and the sneakier parts of the character elude her.” She doesn’t keep up with Nicolas Cage, whose performance critics found surprisingly nuanced, even though he’s doing an Adam West impersonation throughout.
The film’s central question about what happens when ordinary people try to become superheros was already addressed in last year’s Watchmen, which like Kick-Ass was based on a graphic novel, but critics say director Matthew Vaughn did a better job adapting his material into film. There are some clever insights in the film about celebrity culture and the appeal of violent superhero stories, even if some, like Roger Ebert, still find using a young girl to examine those themes, “morally reprehensible.”
In a profile of Moretz in the Sunday New York Times, the director, Matthew Vaughn, pointed out the hypocrisy of those who criticized his movie’s use of profanity while ignoring its violence: “I was like, ‘Does it not bother you that she killed about 53 people in this film?’ … I’m like, ‘Would you rather your daughter swore, or became a masked vigilante killer?’ They’re going, ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ “
Cogently put, sir. But this critic, for one, is going, “Yeah, it does bother me that Moretz’s character, Hit Girl, and her fellow amateur superheroes rack up a body count in the high dozens.” In the course of this zany romp made for the high-school set, human bodies are microwaved, crushed in trash compactors, skewered, bazookaed, and burned alive. And, yes, it’s comic-book violence and deliberately over the top-but since Kick-Ass’ whole premise is that comic-book violence, when enacted in real life, has real consequences, it seems a strange choice to layer Tarantino-style splatter onto the Y.A.-novel setting and play the whole thing for laughs.
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