Who Ass-Kicks The Kick-Ass?

Early on in Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of the Mark Millar graphic novel of the same name, Aaron Johnson - playing the eponymous wannabe teenage superhero - details his masturbatory habits. Anything can set him off, no matter how high-minded his original intentions. Even a National Geographic-style photo of bare-breasted African tribeswomen is enough to get him dropping trou and making both himself and shareholders in Kleenex worldwide that bit happier. It's a sadly apt metaphor for a film that squanders every inch of its ample potential: any time he comes close to an interesting idea, rather than explore it fully Vaughn loses all self-control, retreating instead into gratuitous ultra-violence, witless profanity and fanboy wish-fulfilment. The film appears to be positioning itself as a tongue-in-cheek cross between Alan Moore's Watchmen and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films. Instead, it undermines itself as fatally as Zack Snyder's Watchmen adaptation, and ends up just another Xbox nerd's wank fantasy.

Kick-Ass, film and character alike, is predicated upon one central notion: why has nobody in the real world ever put on a skin-tight costume and fought crime like they do in superhero comics? Photogenic geek Johnson - the male equivalent of Rachel Leigh Cook in She's All That, an obviously attractive guy whose sole concession to his supposed social autism is a pair of unflattering glasses - quickly finds that the answer is because they get beaten, stabbed and hospitalised, then have to ask the paramedics not to tell anyone about the costume. Unperturbed, he continues to suit up, and discovers that there already are, in fact, a couple of people who've thrown on masks and gone a-vigilante-in': namely Nicolas Cage, as a Batman-esque sociopath left a mental wreck by a past injustice, who has since devoted his life to turning his eleven year-old daughter, Chloë Grace Moretz, into an unstoppable, remorseless killing machine. All three are soon implicated in the schemes of local crime-lord Mark Strong, a mafioso prone to cooking unfortunates in industrial microwaves, and come to realise that, lacking any actual superpowers, they may be out of their depth.

The main problem with Kick-Ass is that, for all its 'superheroes in the real world' pretensions, it doesn't exist in anything like the real world. Sure, Johnson gets beaten up for thinking he can simply go out and fight crime with no prior training or unique abilities, but that beating leaves him with his own superpower of sorts - trapped nerve endings that dull his ability to feel pain. Similarly, Moretz, despite having no overtly-stated superpower, effectively is a superhero anyway - a slight, pigtailed, pre-teen girl who is somehow able to kickflip, slice and dice her way through literally dozens of Strong's henchmen with minimal damage to herself, either physical or psychological. Any grip on reality the film has to begin with is completely gone by a climax that involves a combination of a bazooka, a jetpack and gatling guns, and is just as cartoony as any of the books or films it's ostensibly parodying.

All of which broaches another hugely problematic element: people die in Kick-Ass. Like, a lot of people. In incredibly violent ways. For all the comic-book violence of Spider-Man and Batman, their heroes are emphatically not killers. Death, for the most part, is accidental, self-inflicted or both - think of the fates of Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, or Alfred Molina's Doc Ock in Raimi's first two Spider-Man films. Even the one death for which Peter Parker can be seen as being most directly responsible - that of the petty crook who kills Parker's beloved Uncle Ben and is subsequently intimidated by Parker-as-Spider-Man into a fatal accidental fall - prompts a bout of angsty soul-searching. There is no such remorse expressed over any of the very deliberate deaths in Kick-Ass.

This wouldn't be so troubling in and of itself if, as seemingly promised by the film's premise, Vaughn then explored the real-world ramifications of such actions, like the effect being raised on mass-murder might have on Moretz, or proceeded to use the extreme violence as a springboard for some kind of satirical comment on the genre. That is to say - if there was a point to any of the violence beyond 'woah, did you see that? I totally wasted that guy!' But all the dismemberment and bullet-holes - guns being another eye-brow raising addition to the superhero arsenal - are treated with the same breezy attitude as any other comic-book movie might treat a punch-up. Moretz slaughters goons in stylised slo-mo to the bouncy sound of the Banana Splits theme. We're meant to be enjoying this. We're meant to be on the side of the sociopaths.

And make no mistake - Cage and Moretz are both sociopaths, enjoying this as much as Watchmen's Rorschach. The difference is, in Moore's novel at least, we're supposed to be terrified by the prospect of someone like Rorschach existing in the real world. Kick-Ass takes its cues instead from Snyder's film, which missed Moore's point entirely by making the violence look cool instead of a brutal ordeal, and turned Rorschach into some kind of bad-ass anti-hero icon instead of the mentally unstable killer he is. Kick-Ass sets out to be a similarly subversive take on superhero films, but the height of its subversion is to amp up the violence and swearing. Plot-wise, it hews closer to Spider-Man than it would probably care to admit: beaten-down geek becomes empowered by taking matters into his own hands, fails at first, quickly learns from his mistakes and plays to his strengths, gets the girl along the way. It hits every expected beat whilst adding nothing of value. In this sense, it's almost the Shrek of superhero movies: it tries to distance itself from the rest by demonstrating some kind of snarky awareness of the rules, and then shamelessly succumbs to those clichés anyway, in a smug, mean-spirited and far less entertaining way than that which it's attempting to send up.

That's not to say it's without its incidental pleasures. A fleeting glimpse of a sign at a cinema advertising The Spirit 3 is cruel but hilarious. Clark Duke and Evan Peters have a pleasingly easy chemistry as Johnson's only friends, at times appearing to have wandered in off the set of a Judd Apatow production. Cage, it should go without saying, commits whole-heartedly to the proceedings, brilliantly choosing to slip into Adam West-styled speech inflections whenever he's in-costume. But a frustrating sense of squandered potential and queasy morality hangs over the whole thing - a film too determined to pick up a cult following to ever take any of the risks that would guarantee just such devotion in years to come. It's a film made for, and seemingly made by, people who see the likes of Spider-Man as kids' stuff, but whose idea of making it more adult is simply to increase the body count. There's a gunfight towards the end of the film that, at one point, is filmed like a first-person shooter. Says it all, really.