The film’s big selling point is an 11-year-old superhero named Hit Girl who uses profanity that would make Snoop Dog blush and is an unrepentant killing machine. In one scene, she shoots off a guy’s face. In another, she blows through a crowd of thugs with a machine gun. Later, she proves herself quite handy with a machete. All while alternating between wearing leather outfit with a hot purple wig and a school girl outfit with pigtails.
Chloe Grace Moretz, the precocious child actress who plays Hit Girl, is actually a serious talent, reminiscent of a young Jodie Foster. (She’d caught my eye a few weeks earlier in
Diary of a Wimpy Kid—oh, we were all so young then.) But as I watched the film, I couldn’t help but to think to myself, “How on earth did her parents let her make this film?” Not since Natalie Portman teamed up with Luc Besson in The Professional has a child actress been so fetishized and exploited. (Kick-Ass makes that film play like Anne of Green Gables.)
Based on the comic book of the same name,
Kick-Ass tells the story of teenage nobody Dave Lizeweski (Aaron Johnson)—he’s got the requisite two geeky best friends and the crush on the unattainable hot girl (yes, this film is just thatcreative)— who decides to turn himself into a superhero. In fact, he wonders why more people don’t do the same. He buys a wet suit and a set of nunchucks, gives himself the name Kick-Ass, and he’s off. The first time he tries to stop a crime, he is stabbed—graphically—in the gut and, for good measure, run over by a car. (“Awesome!” we are supposed to think.)
Eventually, Dave evokes the ire of a cold-blooded mobster (Mark Strong) whose neglected son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) sees befriending and entrapping Kick-Ass as a way to win his father’s respect.
I might’ve liked this film more—or at least understood what it was driving at—if it stayed true to Dave’s story. He keeps trying to be a superhero, but he can’t quite do it. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop proves to be a problem. It’s awkward walking around town in a wetsuit. And nunchucks are no match for knives and guns.
But when Dave gets in over his head with a bunch of gang-bangers, he is rescued by Hit Girl and her father Big Daddy (Nic Cage, doing one of his strange voices). Turns out, they’re the real deal—self-styled superheroes who get the job done and do seem to have superhuman strength and resources.
So which is it? Are we in the real world here, or some cartoon-like simulacrum? Oh, why should director Matthew Vaughn care when there’s realistic torture scenes to be filmed, buckets of blood to be spilled, and the endlessly entertaining spectacle of an 11-year-old mass murderer?