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Dancing_P [ 6.5 ]
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In my brief dalliances with reading comic books, I went through the majority of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass. I can see why it seemed like a no-brainer to be adapted to film: it moves quickly, it has healthy doses of humor and it follows a fairly streamlined plot that makes adaptation easy and painless. The clincher is that said streamlined plot follows underage characters (including an eleven-year-old girl) laying absolute fucking waste (in overly graphic fashion) to hundreds of people. It's a tough thing to convey appropriately on-screen, where the nuances and shortcuts of the printed page can't be skipped over. This would literally have to be a movie wherein a small girl slits throats with impunity. In that respect, Matthew Vaughn succeeds. He is entirely true to Millar's vision and delivers the most accurate film version of Kick-Ass one could hope for. That doesn't solve everything.
Dave Lisewski (Aaron Johnson) is a typically nerdy high-schooler, obsessed with comic books and incapable of not embarassing himself in front of the girl he likes. On a whim, he decides to create a superhero persona because... no one else has ever done it. He takes to the streets to 'fight crime' despite the fact that he has little to no training in anything and is built like DJ Qualls. This results in him getting himself beat half to death more than once but also brings him YouTube notoriety and the attention of Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, channeling Adam West), a father-daughter team of vigilante superheroes whose ultimate goal is to take out a fearsome gangster (Mark Strong) and his crew.
The biggest problem with the comic was that it never really took position on its tone; it veers wildly between parody, wish-fulfillment fantasy, satire and straight-up superhero action. Vaughn's transposed the comic with commendable accuracy - keeping even the comic's ping-ponging tone. It doesn't help that, while technically proficient, Vaughn's direction doesn't have much personality. It's slick and colorful in a way that's more reminiscent of car commercials than feature films. If we're not meant to take Kick-Ass seriously (and we obviously aren't), it isn't necessarily clear in Vaughn's ultra-slick direction. This is one of the rare times when a weird idiosyncratic director like Sam Raimi going fucking nuts would actually be encouraged. As it stands the film is a slight but entertaining action film, the implications of which are (maybe thankfully) lost under its polished sheen.
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chapter11 [ 9.0 ]
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I'm not sure, but i think it's been a while since i've actively enjoyed a superhero movie as much as "Kick-Ass"---"the Dark Knight" is better, sure, much better in fact, but this sort of funny, thrill-a-minute meta-movie is just right when you've worn down your copy of Nolan's masterwork. Pitch-perfect in its funnier moments, appropriately sober where it needs to be, "Kick-Ass" is an enthralling examination of superhero culture, and the sort of culture that would necessitate superheroes, and, subtly, the madness that exists in those who would voluntarily take up cape and cowl.
All this, and it's acted quite perfectly. Aaron Johnson's a star waiting to happen, Chloe Moretz is already there (due in no small part to her scene-stealing here, reports of which are most definitely *not* exaggerated), and Nic Cage hasn't seemed this appropriate for a movie in years---he's so hammy you can practically taste the sodium, but it works like gangbusters on the screen.
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DokBrowne [ 8.0 ]
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Hey, I liked "Last Action Hero" and appreciated its ambition. This one's good too, inventive, timely, fun and ruthless, plus Nicolas Cage at his most endearingly twisted in a while (that is, he seems miscast as always, but delightfully so - his final scene shrieking commands to his daughter should become a lynchpin of the Nic Cage highlights reel).
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| Weighted Rating | : 7.2 |
| No. Ratings | : 7 | |
| No. Reviews | : 4 | |
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