Kick-Ass Most Assuredly Does Not Kick Ass, Despite Extraordinary Performances from Nicolas Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Despite the seemingly game-changing success of 2016’s Deadpool, R-rated superhero movies remain an anomaly. Even Christopher Nolan’s dark, gritty and violent Batman trilogy was PG-13, as was the even darker, even grittier and MUCH longer 2022 reboot starring Robert Pattinson.
Even after Deadpool’s success, an R-rated superhero movie is a risky proposition. Superhero movies dominate pop culture but “edgy” R-rated provocations are unmistakably the minority.
Studios don’t want to take that kind of chance with marquee names, so R-rated superhero movies have generally focussed on lesser known characters like the various homemade crime-fighters of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick Ass.
A PG-13 version of Kick Ass would make about as much sense as caffeine-free Red Bull. Kick Ass exists for the sake of empty, facile shock. This is not your daddy’s superhero movie. Instead it’s self-consciously “edgy”, extreme and in your face the same way a Mountain Dew commercial from the 1990s might be.
Kick Ass has a lot of problems, beginning with a tone that’s smug, self-satisfied and transgressive in the most juvenile possible sense. But Kick-Ass biggest problem is its title character.
As blandly realized by Aaron Taylor Johnson, homemade superhero Kick-Ass, AKA nerdy high school student Dave Lizewski is a blank slate, a dope, a sorry excuse for a protagonist and a hero. He is the title character and the lead yet he’s also quite possibly the least interesting character in the film. A better film would push him to the side or cut him out altogether and focus on the infinitely more charismatic and compelling supporting characters, most notably Chloë Grace Moretz’s instantly iconic eleven year old assassin Hit-Girl and her doting father/mentor in the ways of murder Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage).
Kick-Ass opens by asking what it imagines is still a fresh question/premise. Why don’t people in the real world decide to become superheroes the way people they do in comic books?
The answer is that even with a small fortune worth of guns and gadgets and super-suits, a homemade real world superhero would probably get killed or seriously injured almost immediately.
That’s what happens to Dave during his initial outing as Kick Ass but he comes back stronger than ever and, like a total Mary Sue, makes an implausible and impossible leap from zero to hero, from wannabe to the real thing. A clip of him Kick-Ass kicking ass becomes the most watched clip on the internet, narrowly beating out one of a cat playing the piano.
Dave’s dream girl Katie Deauxma develops an interest in the dork with the secret life but only because she thinks that he’s gay, and consequently the perfect sidekick/best friend/status symbol. Dave goes along with the deception because it allows him to get closer to the girl of his dreams.
In another context and another film, injecting a raunchy, profane, hyper-violent real-life superhero movie with a massive injunction of 1980s-style teen sex comedy hijinks might come off as goofy, fun and subversive. Not here.
Kick-Ass’ regrettable weakness for Private School for Girls-style shenanigans isn’t funny or clever because it accurately reflects the movie’s violently immature, juvenile attitude towards sex. Like the awful first Terminators film, it’s not riffing on the insulting stupidity of teen sex comedy tropes so much as they’re playing them straight.
Kick-Ass eventually hooks up with other homemade vigilantes in colorful costumes, most notably profane eleven year old super-assassin Mindy McReady AKA Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her doting dad Damon Macready AKA Big Daddy (Cage).
Damon Macready suggests what Ned Flanders might be like if, in addition to being a cardigan-clad mustachioed exemplar of cozy Christianity he was also an utterly unhinged vigilante obsessed with transforming his little girl into the perfect killing machine.
The poignant, juicy and ultimately tragic role of Damon Macready takes the Overgrown Boy Scout aspect of Cage’s multi-faceted persona into some dark, unexpected places of violent sociopathy. Yet there’s an earnestness and a sincerity to Cage’s performance that undercuts the film’s empty nihilism in a fascinating way.
Kick-Ass doesn’t believe in anything beyond its own awesomeness but Damon is a true believer in truth, justice and the American Way and is willing to put his life, and the life of the person closest to him, on the line every day.
It’s a legitimately great, shockingly nuanced performance in a motion picture that’s ultimately not worthy of it. Cage’s boldly sincere character actor turn here goes boldly against the grain of the rest of the film in a way that almost, but does not quite redeem it.
One of the things I love most about Cage’s portrayal of Damon McCready/Big Daddy is that when he’s in character as Big Daddy he speaks with an unmistakable Adam West inflection he never uses when he’s not in a silly suit that’s as close to the Bat-Suit as you can get without copyright lawyers entering the picture.
Big Daddy may be an unhinged figure of vengeance but he’s a superhero traditionalist. In Kick-Ass being a superhero is a performance and Damon, like all of us, got his ideas about how a superhero talks and behaves from pop culture.
In his final scenes, the doomed Big Daddy seemingly sheds the personas of Big Daddy AND Damon McReady like a snake shedding its skin and becomes some other entity entirely, a ghostly spirit who communicates in an unearthly wail.
It’s an extraordinary performance that scored Cage a nomination for the most prestigious honor in the arts in the form of a Teen Choice Awards nomination for Choice Movie Actor in the Action category.
Because the world is a profoundly messed-up place, the breakout performer here is not Cage but Moretz. Moretz is absolutely magnetic. She’s a powder keg of precocious energy and unhinged aggression, a little girl with a John Wick-level gift for righteous mass murderer.
It’s a great, star-making performance of a character that is beyond problematic. In Hit-Girl, Kick-Ass has created a breakout character custom-designed to appeal to the worst people in the world, namely Alt-Right pedophiles with a hard-on for the Second Amendment and girls well beneath the age of consent.
In the single ickiest moment in a motion picture with more than its share, one of our hero’s jackass friends sees Hit-Girl in action and professes his undying love for her. When Marty Eisenberg (Clark Duke) tells the creep that Hit-Girl looks like she’s eleven years old, he tells him he’ll wait for her.
It feels like the film is giving the audience permission to think that the potty-mouthed, blood-thirsty vigilante WHO IS MANY, MANY, MANY YEARS BENEATH THE AGE OF CONSENT is, in fact, kind of hot, or extremely hot.
That is beyond creepy and disconcerting. The film’s romanticization of Hit-Girl’s violent sociopathy feels not just gross but irresponsible, particularly during a scene where the CHILD dresses up in a Catholic school girl outfit as bait to attract the attention of a potential kiddy-diddler she then executes swiftly and without remorse.
My reaction to Kick-Ass the second time around was pretty much the same as the first time around. There’s a lot that’s right about Kick-Ass, particularly the performances from Cage, Moretz and Mark Strong and Michael Rispoli as the intriguingly pragmatic bad guy and his main henchman respectively. I also liked Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the secondary bad guy, a rich kid who who reinvents himself as superhero Red Mist to get closer to Kick-Ass.
There’s a wonderful stand-alone moment deep into the film when Red Mist picks up Kick-Ass in his souped-up automobile and the two groove dorkily to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” For a brief, glorious idyll, all of the superhero stuff falls away and they’re just too deeply uncool kids dancing terribly to cool music.
But the good in Kick-Ass is outweighed by the bad. Johnson leaves a charisma vacuum at the film’s core and the Grand Gestalt is hopelessly off.
Kick-Ass is a curdled dark comedy with a handful of transcendent performances that add something new to the superhero genre beyond middle-school bully nastiness.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!