Don't be fooled by the TV ads or the trailer: "Kick-Ass" is not for the PG-13 crowd. It's rated R for a reason lots of reasons.
And we're talking "hard R," Quentin Tarantino territory. You'd think from the way that the film is being marketed that it's.
A goofy, lighthearted comedy about nerdy kids who don colorful latex outfits to fight crime.
"Kick-Ass" is a lot darker and meaner than that. We not only hear F-bombs but the hated C-word. Limbs are sliced off, torsos are impaled, heads are battered.Yeah, we've heard and seen it all before, but here's the twist: The curses and bloody violence are coming from an 11-year-old girl.
So consider yourself warned: Many moviegoers are going to be offended. But if you forget the way it's being marketed and take it for what it is — an outrageously violent, humorously twisted adaptation of a comic book — "Kick-Ass" lives up to its name.
It's demented, in much the same way that Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies and "Inglourious Basterds" (recently a best-picture Oscar nominee, you may recall) — or Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight," for that matter — are demented. But it's in a highly entertaining way if you're willing to view the movie with the comic-book sensibility with which it was made. At various times it's intensely suspenseful, wildly exciting and uproariously funny.
Our story begins with geeky high-school comic-book lover Dave (Aaron Johnson) deciding it's time to become a real-life crime fighter. So he sends away for a costume, puts it on, takes to the streets and ... gets his butt kicked. But that's just the start, and soon he becomes a media phenomenon and youth-culture hero known simply as Kick-Ass.
He's not the only masked marvel in town. There's also a father-and-daughter vigilante team, Damon (Nicolas Cage), or Big Daddy, and 11-year-old Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz, who steals the picture), or Hit-Girl. They're on a no-holds-barred mission to destroy the empire of crime kingpin Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong of "Sherlock Holmes"), and that means lots and lots of carnage. D'Amico's teenage son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, better known as McLovin'), decides to help dad by posing as a do-gooder himself; thus, Red Mist is born.
Of all of these characters, good or bad, with the possible exception of Big Daddy, Hit-Girl is the toughest. Given that she's a peanut who, with her purple wig and schoolgirl skirt, looks like she'd be more at home at a fifth-grade costume birthday party, that's pretty funny in itself.
One of the film's comic highlights comes when she's whaling on a group of armed thugs. She leaps and tumbles around the room like an acrobat, using various weapons to slice, dice and otherwise mutilate bad guys who are no match for her. What makes the scene so funny is this: While she's doing all of this bodily harm, the chipper theme song for the old kiddie TV show "Banana Splits" — "tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la ..." — plays on the soundtrack.
Sick? Absolutely. There are other little pop-culture references thrown in. When Damon dresses up as Big Daddy, in what looks like a Batman costume, he changes his voice pattern to speak in the halting, dramatic, cornball style Adam West used as Batman in the '60s TV show.
But Hit-Girl is clearly the star of this show. There's a fine line between what's amusingly irreverent and what's offensive, and many moviegoers are likely to find "Kick-Ass" crosses it. But you can argue that this is the case with the work of lots of filmmakers, whether it's the Coen brothers or the Farrelly brothers. We all draw the line somewhere, and, despite some of its questionable aspects, I found "Kick-Ass" to be a blast.
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