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'

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of ‘Watchmen’

...and I feel fine: Faithfulness to the quintessentially novelistic source material turns out to be the weakest link of Watchmen.

A joke: a man in the midst of a deep depression visits the doctor in an attempt to alleviate his malaise: he can find no solace in a harsh world and its vague future. The doctor prescribes a visit to world famous clown Pagliacci, which is sure to cheer him up. The man bursts into tears – I am Pagliacci, he explains. What hope do we have when the distractions we have assembled to take our minds off the nastiness of the human condition become themselves afflicted?

This anecdote appears in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel ‘Watchmen’, released in the mid-eighties, and evoking a M.A.D world on the brink of nuclear armageddon, peopled by a citizenry who are fanatical about anything but love or truth, burying their heads in gang-culture, nostalgia, and even comic books so as to avoid sensible engagement with an increasingly eschatological world. Masked avengers in this work are not emblems of justice in a gothic metropolis, but are rather symptom of personal gratification and the power of consumer branding.

In adapting the novel to the screen, director Zack Snyder and his team have retained this grim yarn, as well as most of the words and images, translating them sometimes slavishly onto the screen in a similar, if with a more varied palette, manner of the Snyder’s popular version of Frank Miller’s 300. But this is not a story about Spartans and Persians and constant mythologizing and bloodshed. Moore’s novel, and by extension the script of the film, is an attempt to strip away myth and grandiosity, replacing it with troublingly deep psychology and an acute examination of why people dressing up in masks and fighting crime appealed and appeals so much to the American psyche, and how this appeal is tied up with the outcome of the Second World War and the unseen forces at work in the subsequent Cold War. That’s a lot to squeeze in, even with Watchmen’s two hours forty minutes running time. In making the attempt, the film reveals the massive potential of its own medium – unfortunately, by failing to fulfil it.

As with the novel, there are a wide variety of characters, themes, alternative histories, flashbacks, locations, plots and sub-plots. Without the structuring of chapters, and even the careful positioning of cells on a double-page layout, many elements lose their force. A cannier director may have made more of an attempt to translate the visual and thematic language which Moore and artist Dave Gibbons worked with so carefully into the filmic dimension. Instead, he transliterates. Snyder reproduces, rather than reinvigorates. The narrative feels like a constant plateau of meaning and emotion, only rising and falling by tiny increments, rather than tightening the nearer the metaphorical doomsday clock gets to midnight. Never mind that the surprise reveal of the villain is undermined by fresh framing and sequencing, the finale fails to flare the imagination more than the rest of the film because it is handled in the exact same manner as the rest of the film. Shot, reverse-shot, slo-mo punch, smashing of a glass table, repeat. The title sequence, in which ideas and referents from the novel are presented as Wes Anderson-like tableau’s to the unmediated tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, manages to avoid this flattening-out, as does the depiction of a trip to Mars (don’t laugh) and the metaphysical anguish one character feels by his very existence and responsibilities, all set to some of Philip Glass’ music from Koyaanisqatsi (a 1984 film concerning the disharmony and unsustainability of modern life).

These interesting and unexpected musical cues are not alone: also used are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, some more successfully than others, but all adding some cultural heft otherwise absent: no use listening to Rorschach, a single-minded vigilante, bitch about the state of New York (“this city is like an open sewer with sidewalks of blood”) when the film makes no effort to ground itself in the streets he walks. Like the back-lot of a Spiderman film, or the digital sets so beloved of late, even constant views of the Twin Towers on the skyline fail to position the audience as anything other than outsiders looking in on a fish-tank, our perception warped, the objects we study unreal. This quality might suit the plotline involving two retired Watchmen who re-don their costumes for the thinly-veiled sake of some soft-core action and empowering beat-downs (focussing as this strand does on the infantilism and egoism inherent in the genre), but the sheen does not sit well with either the intensely violent and uncompromising Rorschach or the corporeally challenged Doc Manhattan, a scientist turned to pure energy in an experiment who can eviscerate opponents and used this skill to win America the Vietnam War. These two characters, as well as the fallen comrade who opens the film and the truly Machiavellian adversary who was behind the whole scheme (nothing less than saving the world from itself), are all embodiments of moralistic outlooks, each embedded strongly with American (and human) history. Watching such lofty personifications duke it out at one-quarter speed is disappointing, at best.

What then of that poor, existentially troubled clown? Perceived wisdom is that the superhero comic book is an escape, a fantasy of masculine power and ethical simplicities in which good triumphs and no thanks ma’am, no need to thank me, just doing my job. Comics may not be the opiate of the masses, but they help the opium go down. In examining this phenomenon in such detail, and stressing the danger it poses not just to American foreign policy but also to the basic human ability to relate to one another, Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ bit off more than it could chew, but asked questions about the nature of escapism, and the danger of fabulist story-telling and mis-used imagination. Snyder’s Watchmen, through the configuring of an invisible Russian threat and a caricature Nixon, fails to exhibit the same apprehension about its own medium, instead settling on being a spectacular, morally swampy distraction.