Curses! A Review of 'Kick-Ass'

Like hastily eaten junk food, comic book films continue to repeat in stale belches across cinema screens. It is only logical: no matter how minor the comic it will still have some devoted followers, who will – being likely in their teens and very active in techno-blogo-twittersphere – generate more hype than warranted, increasing the slim possibility of a decent opening weekend before inevitable and hasty evaporation of ticket sales and audience interest. In addition to this financial concern, the comic turn is natural considering the movement of mainstream American filmmaking towards hollowness, callousness and self-justified viciousness.

It seemed that Kick-Ass would be something of a relief from all this. Promising a knowing inclusion of the dramatic and aesthetic expectations of the “young adult” comic book genre (a deadly eleven-year old girl!), but with a critical eye towards the link between this film world and the real world: how are the goals and ambitions of the average American teenager formed and manipulated by widespread generic banality? The real and the fantasy feed off each other, currently only able to offer a trajectory that spirals ever downward. There is certainly room for a film attacking these issues and which, even if not excoriating the peddlers of morally lazy trash, at least opens up alternative avenues of thought to those of unreal empowerment through dress-up and revenge.

Kick-Ass seems to engage with these issues, but very quickly backs away. Or, more accurately, becomes drawn in by the lure of easy answers through violence. The protagonist, Dave Lizewski, is tired of being a non-presence at school and getting casually mugged on his way home. Donning a mask and batons to fight crime, he is promptly beaten up and stabbed. A bracing concept. Yet there is something unsettling about the stabbing. Digital blood, followed by a comedic overwrought car crash. This is not bathos, it is glorification.

(These digital spurts of blood are becoming increasingly prevalent in Blockbuster cinema, again a result of the comic influence. But while the panels of Frank Miller feature a splatter of red across them, the brutality inherent in this captured moment is lost when translated to the screen. These gushes of obvious post-production tinkering plainly separate violence and spectacle, focussing exclusively on the latter. It may be a direct translation of the visual style of the comic onto the film, as it was in Sin City and 300, but the different medium alters the meaning of the aesthetic. Grittiness is expressed differently on a printed page than it is on the silver screen at twenty-four frames a second.)

The violence in Kick-Ass functions narratively (initially at least) as the unpleasant intrusion of the real into the fantasy; however, it is filmed in such a way that it merely fuels the fantasy, driving it further into masturbatory indulgence.

Fine, then. This is not to be the To The Lighthouse of comic book films (as last years Watchmen could and should have been, in the same way that the sharp source material by Alan Moore was so comprehensive it made all further graphic novels about masked avengers redundant). As it develops further, and Lizewski (superhero name: Kick-Ass) becomes a media star through youtube footage and canny social networking, there is plenty of room made available for satire to creep in. Unfortunately, nothing except sensationalism manages to survive the ensuing din. The film aims for cynical but ends up utterly charmless.

A more successful duo of crime fighters is introduced, who are at war with a villainous yet wholly undefined syndicate responsible (indirectly, it must be highlighted) for the death of an inevitably unnamed and voiceless female figure of maternal comfort (worryingly, Lizewski’s mother is also depicted as dying silently and indolently). These various characters all become embroiled in possibly the most lazily plotted of such scripts to date, and less and less gets in the way of violent action sequences (each one with a soundtrack stolen from elsewhere: John Murphy’s signature cues for 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, and Ennio Morricone’s overexposed For a Few Dollars More theme).

Director Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, made in the ebb of hype following Guy Ritchie’s own London gangster films (which Vaughn himself co-produced), was one of the most stylish and inventive British films of the last ten years, easily earning the title of The Long Good Friday for the twenty-first century. Since this, however, Vaughn has increasingly looked like a director-for-hire, even though he co-produced and co-wrote Kick-Ass. The most memorable parts of the film are the zaniest, and feel distinctly like they have been conceived of solely to keep Vaughn interested in his production (and it takes something pretty zany for interest to be retained in a film which cues up the song ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ when two superheroes meet).

We end up on the same damn rooftop that Iron Man 2 ended on: man and woman sharing an intimate moment, a poor digital recreation of New York behind them, the unwelcome promise of a sequel, and not a single thought given to the disproportionate collateral damage wrought during the preceding “adventures”. Kick-Ass in the end tells us nothing more than that the temptation for violent catharsis through a cartoon lens is too much even for what seems a highly talented crew. The generic template is adhered to so closely that attempts to interpret any critical discourse on the unpleasantness unfolding become increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. This is not to say it is not entertaining: it’s a film with great comic timing and some fresh ideas up its sleeve. That it feels so hollow in the end should be a lesson for future filmmakers to avoid indulging in the temptations that are here so fully given in to.

Further reading:

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of 'Watchmen'

Big Nowhere: A Review of 'The Killer Inside Me'

The question of whether the depiction of violence is morally justifiable has been cropping up a lot in discussions of Michael Winterbottom’s new work ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The issue is certainly one worth exploring, but gives the impression that the film itself is an ‘8mm’ style investigation into the intersection of realism and fakery, violence and pornography, titillation and culpability. It is none of these things, instead settling for a slick, shallow-feeling noir with some seriously upsetting sequences, which utilises ambiguity a lot more than its occasional upfront brutality would suggest.

Casey Affleck plays small-town cop Lou Ford, an aw-shucks simpleton with a pretty fiancé and a penchant for stovetop coffee and classical music. Or at least that is what Lou himself thinks the rest of the town take him for, when in truth he carries the sickness – a compulsion to murder women, boys, and anyone else he can convince himself is an impediment to his half-baked schemes. Or at least, sickness (always italics) is what it is termed in the original 1952 novel by dime-store noir master Jim Thompson. The film itself suggests a Freudian web of troubling childhood episodes, Winterbottom calls it schizophrenia in interviews, while Affleck’s own performance suggests a self-deluded sociopathy.

This grey indeterminacy at the heart of the drama is what both makes it a hollow and unconvincing experience as well as a compelling and tense one. The reconcilement of such opposites is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Béte Humaine, in which various steamy affairs and murderous impulses are all simmered together in an overpoweringly gothic stew which makes nods towards social relevance, but only ever satirically so.

‘The Killer Inside Me’ flirts with the gothic in the dark impulses of the characters, but retains a blandly art deco façade. It is this matter-of-factness that makes the killings so vicious and potentially offensive, not just the calm way they are filmed or the bizarre continued devotion that everyone seems to still feel for Lou even when he is beating their face to a pulp. This disassociation from the protagonist and the film-makers intentions (the narrative has such a recycled clean-break-gone-wrong framework as to be almost invisible) threatens to estrange the audience; the sustained depiction of it pulls us back, forces us to re-associate with what we are witnessing in a way that Lou does not. These are ideas Quentin Tarantino has been playing around with for a decade now; unsurprisingly, Winterbottom’s clear-eyed commitment to them is more rewarding.

These killings, which stand so proud and vital within both the film and discussions about it, threaten to overshadow the rest of ‘The Killer Inside Me’. If they are not allowed to do so then the weaknesses surrounding them begin to reveal themselves: the ambling plotting, the disconnected final reel, the often sub-par musical choices, the plainness of the filming which seems ill-at-ease with what Winterbottom states is intended to be such a subjective experience of a killer’s own mindset. Such analysis reveals further how the film plays with violence as a structuring device, a marketing ploy, a (non)pleasure to be focussed upon at the expense of all else. Kathryn Bigelow does much the same in her cinema, and lays herself open to the same accusations of relying upon the very conventions she exposes.

The entertainment to be found in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is not of the visceral variety, nor the generic. These pleasures are offered, but critiqued and disregarded to the extent that to come away from the film praising the shooting, or the cleverness of the plot, would be somewhat perverse. Lou, it turns out, is unaware that he has not quite pulled the wool over the eyes of those around him as successfully as he thought, and this revelation further complicates the interaction between the film and the spectator. Like Lou, we aren’t sure quite whether we are as secure in our received narrative as we seem, and like those around him we don’t understand what the motives for the crimes we witness are. These misgivings, and not the fierceness of the violence, are what offer ‘The Killer Inside Me’ its power.