Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass - 2010, Matthew Vaughn

How do you like your comic book movie adaptations?
Do you like them to play it straight like The Dark Night? Or do you prefer the more tongue in cheek; don’t take themselves too seriously style of Iron Man.
Kick-Ass occupies a new territory of comic book movie (I don’t consider it an adaptation as the comic and the film were conceived together, even if the comic appeared first).

Kick-Ass is the most honest comic book movie yet. Teenagers read comic books and Kick-Ass is full of two of the biggest parts of every teenage boy’s life: foul language and jokes about wanking (that’s a massive generalisation, I know).

Previous comic book films pick a style and stick to it. Either they are too serious to be fun, or they are too much fun to include the ‘inappropriate’ adult material that inhabits all the best written comic books. Kick Ass is fun and very much in the style of a comic book film, it looks a lot like Raimi’s Spiderman films, perhaps intentionally. It is the natural next step in the evolution of comic book films; a combination of extreme ‘comic book’ violence not suitable for kids, funny foul language (which is the language spoken by teenagers and adults who should know better), and a bright, colourful aesthetic reminiscent of the old Marvel comics.

So does this new style of comic book film work? Maybe, but not as far as Kick Ass is concerned. The good news is that the failings are directorial, not conceptual. Pop-culture reference has been old hat in films since the Star Trek reboot, where they were perfected. Pop-culture reference only really works if it is subtle and truly relevant to the film it appears in. The first half of Kick-Ass is packed with distracting comic book reference, and one glaring and shameful reference to the director’s previous work (maybe it was symbolic...?). By the second half it seems that the film makers were satisfied with the number of ‘look at this wink wink’ moments to forget about them and concentrate on ensuring the climax to the film didn’t disappoint (which it doesn’t).

If you’ve seem the film yourself, you’re probably screaming ‘But the whole film is one big reference to comic books, that’s the point you idiot!’ But that’s also my point. Achieving the right tone and ‘feel’ of a film is difficult enough, and with something like Kick-Ass it’s even more difficult. I think that Kick-Ass should have been played slightly straighter, that way the audience would have the affinity for the characters the director obviously wanted us to have by the time the tension racks up. And the best films feature believable characters reacting in a way you can believe even in unrealistic circumstances.

I don’t dislike Kick-Ass. The ‘Superbad meets Spiderman’ analogy is lazy, but somehow accurate.