UK Release Date: 26-03-2010
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Chloe Moretz, Aaron Johnson
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Matthew Vaughan
Country: US

The arrival on screen of Marvel writer Mark Millar’s subversive superhero story has been announced by much brouhahah in the media, basically because of the ‘c-word’ coming out of the mouth of an 11-year-old girl.

There, I’ve done it. I’ve mentioned the ‘c’ word: controversy. Perhaps the review should have ended here? Job done? Well, not quite, because as intermittently funny as Kick-Ass is, it isn’t half as subversive as it believes itself to be, nor as meta-textually sophisticated as it would like to be, at least not beyond its own hermetically-sealed comic book world of references. While it may piss on its own graphically drawn superhero tropes, it doesn’t even begin to piss on Joseph Campbell. Actually, not all the nods are to the world of comics. Being a film, the majority of references the non-comic reading audience might ‘get’ are the ones to other films: Scarface among them and even Enter the Dragon, with a climactic battle between goody and baddy reflected in a wink towards that film’s climactic maze of mirrors’ scene. But then, not having read a word of Mark Millar’s original, I can’t be certain it isn’t strewn with cinematic references at source.

Teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is obsessed with comic books and becomes a real life superhero (practicing his makeshift weapon prowess, à la Travis Bickle, in front of the mirror at home), bar one minor detail: he possesses no superpowers whatsoever. His incompetent antics, which the media proceeds to make of what it wants and needs (art imitates the life of the film indeed), inspire a sub-culture of copycats. Dave then meets up with the crazed vigilante pair Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his 11-year-old katana-wielding daughter Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz) the real kick-ass of this film’s title and the best thing in it. The little Hit Girl indulges in some very politically incorrect point blank gunplay under the instruction of Big Daddy (don’t try this at home, kids), has a mouth like an Anglo-Saxon toilet and is sometimes attired like a Japanese schoolgirl with knee-high white socks and a very short tartan skirt (yes, like me, you all know the images I mean; the film’s makers certainly do) as a diversionary tactic for her next beady-eyed evil victim.

Marvel writer Millar is a lay preacher with a self-professed strong Catholic faith, but there is no hidden agenda here. The object of the film is surely fun and not instruction, its object to challenge fidgety bums rather than uptight perceptions, to fix eyes upon the screen rather than fix our moral compasses. And Kick-Ass at least does that, because much fun is had by all, including the audience. My main personal caveat (apart from why Hit Girl didn’t use one of her ‘nades when cornered) is that once we’ve seen Moretz’s first turn on screen – and her action sequences could grace a Yuen Wo-Ping multi-combo-move – the film then nosedives whenever she is absent from it, a problem compounded by the overlong screen time devoted to hoodlum Frank D’Amico, in a parody of what’s already (and has been for a long time) a parody of genuine hoods in mainstream cinema. Mark Strong did a much better comic villain turn in an episode of Sharpe a decade ago.

I get it. This isn’t a film for adults. This isn’t even a film for adults who steadfastly refuse to grow up (among whose number I proudly count myself). This is a film for a teenage audience conversant with iPhone txt rather than meta-text, with YouTube and Facebook rather than narrative and non-narrative cinema. And that’s my main problem with it. For all its references, the film flatters to deceive – it actually possesses no literary or cinematic sophistication whatsoever. Kick-Ass is hermetically sealed, but only within its own mass popular cultural self-satisfaction, an exercise in mutual appreciation between film and teen audience to affirm just how damn hip both are. It’s as if world literature never happened and, on this evidence, it never had to anyway. Mass popular culture doesn’t generally need literary references anymore; it doesn’t even need literature, unless it’s in the form of compacted tag lines to accompany a dominant 24/7 visual mass communication world. If you are looking for some literary sophistication, The Big Bang Theory as (niche) popular culture still has it. Or even more pertinently, watch 1999’s Mystery Men (from which Kick-Ass seems to have lifted more than a few ideas) on DVD. The relentless wit of that film’s script, its warmth and charm, already seems to belong to a bygone age. Everything is so cool now.