KICK-ASS

“Kick-Ass,” the movie based on the comic book series by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., opened April 16, and it virtually tied with another cartoon feature, the animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” in box office revenue — both roughly $20 million. For “Kick-Ass,” that’s $5-10 million shy of the amount predicted by wise-guy box office analysts. Millar joined the analysts in the weeks before the movie’s release: “This is a movie about comic fans, made by comic fans.” Just what we need: another niche flick for a neurotic niche. The so-called hero of the funnybook and the motion picture is a teenager who, enamored of superheroes, dresses up like his idols, tries to fight crime, and gets his tuckus trounced. The comic book, according to Entertainment Weekly (April 9), outsold Spider-Man during its 8-issue run, 2008-2010. A preview at last summer’s Sandy Eggo Comic-Con earned a standing ovation and has generated “the kind of buzz that any mega-budget film would envy.”

In addition to “a uniquely self-aware blend of comic action and realistic gore,” the movie brims with foul language of the kind that the thirteen-year-old actress who utters it would get “grounded forever” if she used it in real life, she says. Playing her father in the movie is Nicolas Cage, a man so wrapped up in four-color fantasy that he named his son Kal-El, Superman’s birth name. Director Matthew Vaughn says the burgeoning popularity of “Kick-Ass” derives from an increasingly jaded audience: “Superhero movies are getting too generic,” he says. “Where’s the one that kids can really relate to? For me, that’s ‘Kick-Ass.’” Early tracking reports, saith EW, “show the movie playing as well with women as with men — a rarity in the male-driven world of comic book pics.” But perhaps not all that surprising since the movie ridicules the superhero fixation among the males. And there are more movies of this breed just down the road, “a coming wave of snarky, self-aware comic-nerd movies about real-dude superheroes” — “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (August) and “The Green Hornet” (December).

As the “Kick-Ass” movie headed toward its April 16th debut, it appeared that in spite of its edgy “hard R” content, it was getting mostly positive reviews with a 74% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But not everyone was enthusiastic.

At the Denver Post, movie critic Lisa Kennedy was not amused: “Just because ‘Kick-Ass’ has a winning 11-year-old girl as one of its most unforgettable characters doesn’t mean Vaughn’s crazed ride of a flick is for kids. It so isn’t. It’s potty-mouthed and dementedly violent in the way that films based on comics so often are. R-rated, the movie is best for adults whose inner teen still aches to right wrongs but doesn’t have the skill set to wreak havoc on the bad guys.”  Sounds like she’s been reading Roger Ebert.

Although Ebert enjoyed the film’s early scenes, praised the work of Aaron Johnson and Chloe Moretz, and even acknowledged that the film was indeed a satire, he labeled the movie as “morally reprehensible.” Ebert’s attack on the film, which may have some element of truth to it but is ultimately unfair to the filmmakers, is summed up in this passage: “I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what? The movie's rated R, which means in this case that it's doubly attractive to anyone under 17. I'm not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I'm thinking of 6-year-olds.”

But at Time magazine, Richard Corliss was thrilled to his cultural/philosophical/critical core: “To apotheosize the cliches of the genre while subverting them is a neat trick, but the ‘Kick-Ass’ cadre pulls it off. ... The result is a work that spills out of itself to raise issues about all superhero characters, all action pictures. Millar isn’t boasting when he writes in the making-of book that ‘Kick-Ass’ could ‘redefine superhero movies in the same way “Pulp Fiction”redefined crime movies.”

Just what we need—another redefinition that redefines the newly defined. Oh, where will it all end?

The movie includes an animated sequence about the origin of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, which Big Daddy ostensibly is telling as a comic book that he draws. Romita directed and drew the sequence. Jami Philbrick at Buzz Up, asked Romita what the experience of doing animation was like for him. Said Romita: “It’s more of a great story than it is an effort because if someone tells you that you’re going to direct an animated sequence, and then do the art work for the animated sequence, people are going to think that you’re working on it for the rest of your life. What Matthew has is this great computer program that was from the Spielberg dinosaur movie, ‘Jurassic Park.’ It’s the updated version of it that takes simple drawings and 360-degree models, and you can adapt it from that. In other words, you don’t have to draw 64 frames per second. Anyway, he said to me, ‘Frame this section out as you would a comic, and we’re going to animate it.’ ... It’s about sixty or ninety seconds depending, but Matthew’s just tweaking a few of the frames, and I’ve got about sixty drawings left to go.”

The movie, while a sequel to the comic book, is also a prequel to the next Kick-Ass comic book story arc — and it launches the Kick-Ass graphic novel, comprising the initial seven-issue comic book series.