Kick-Ass (2010)

Kick-Ass is another superhero movie based on comic books, but the superheroes of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. isn't like every other superhero out there. However. After watching Defendor earlier this year, there's something to be said for a new look at an old genre.

Starring Aaron Johnson as Kick-ass, Chloe Moretz as Hit-Girl, Nicholas Cage as Big Daddy and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Red Mist, supported by Clark Duke, Evan Peters, Lyndsy Fonseca and Mark Strong, Kick-Ass is Sin City meets Superbad or Kill Bill meets Adventureland or something like that. Superheroes without superpower, a teenage geek, a crime family and a lone dad bringing up a daughter his own way. It's not your usual Spider-Man or Batman story, and it's not even your usual geek-teen-story. They've mixed and mashed, they pay homeage, they know their genres and they do mostly entertain.

It's still far from perfect. I haven't read the comic books, so I'm only basing my view at the movie presented. I know there's some difficulties bringing life to comic book's heroes, as Daredevil, Elektra and several others have proven over the years, but Kick-Ass fails on some of the fundamental parts. They forget their main focus has to be entertaining, not at least because of their unusual characters, and then spend way too much of the first half on the boring stuff. With almost two hours runtime there's no excuse for spending so much time on so trivial stuff as they've done here.

I also rarely read about movies before watching, and one of the very few things I've read the past hour is a scene they've changed from the comic books. I'm not going to spoil anything by telling about it, but they really shouldn't have done that. I don't care about being true to the comic as I've got no interest in it, but I object because the scene was awful to watch in the movie. It just didn't work according to the characters personalities presented prior to it. Anyways, hard to say much more about it without spoiling anything.

Some of the music is really well picked. It was highly enjoyable to suddenly recognize Ennio Morricone's score from For a Few Dollars More. I also really enjoyed where they had placed Joan Jett's Bad Reputation, maybe especially so since I recently watched The Runaways.

We spent a lot of time with the bad guys in this movie, but they were still as boring, uninteresting and red shirt-ed as in every other movie with boring bad guys. The movie suffers from it as it kills the pacing, it makes the length run unnecessary long and we still don't feel even a little sadness when one of them dies.

All in all this movie is enjoyable enough, but I rather recommend Defendor for an unusual superhero movie. It had a lot more heart, despite also Kick-Ass tried to portray having it. It was also funnier and Woody did a lot better than any of the second rate heroes we met here. Most of all it didn't spend as much time on scenes we really could have done without, and there lays this movies biggest failure.