Matthew Vaughn | 117 mins | cinema | 15 / R
If you happen to remember my (first) Watchmen review, you may recall that I asserted the following:
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen Film is not “the big screen equivalent of Alan Moore’s Watchmen” — that would be a movie, likely very different to the graphic novel, that examined and deconstructed representations of superheroes in cinema and television.
To cut to the chase, Kick-Ass is that film. Yes, it’s still adapted from a pre-existing comic book text, and it doesn’t “examine and deconstruct” quite as methodically — or, if you prefer, “as coldy” — as both Moore and Snyder did; but it still takes its cues as much, if not more, from fellow superhero films and TV series than directly from comics. Much as Watchmen offered variations of specific characters and situations in comics, so too does Kick-Ass from their film counterparts: Kick-Ass himself has the whole “awkward teenage experience” thing of Spider-Man, but fully updated to the era of internet social networking (even if it’s a behind-the-times use of MySpace over Facebook or Twitter); while Big Daddy is a clear Batman analogy, with elements of The Punisher thrown in for good measure.
Elements and moments in this vein permeate the film: Nic Cage employing an Adam West Batman voice for Big Daddy; the black eyeliner required to complete his mask; the Spider-Man plot structure (particularly early on) and numerous references (the opening voiceover, or when Kick-Ass considers jumping rooftops); the “chicks dig the car”-esque scenes with Red Mist — the list goes on, other sequences spoofing whole genre clichés (the “first night on the job”, for example) as well as such specific films.
The score is similarly perfect, mixing serious action queues with appropriately-placed fun songs (mainly during Hit Girl’s action sprees) and more knowing nods to other films — listen out for almost-note-perfect riffs on the famous Superman theme and Danny Elfman’s Batman work.
And, again like Watchmen, Kick-Ass takes all these familiar elements and clichés and attempts to place them in ‘the real world’ (though its real world is far closer to, um, the real real world than Watchmen’s alternate history). What this means, practically, is that Kick-Ass gets his ass kicked. Badly. And that his enemies aren’t cackling megalomaniacs who leave handy riddles around or plot to pollute the water supply, but everyday muggers and, at worst, crime kingpins.
This, I suppose, could be seen as where it takes on Batman Begins; signs seem to suggest Kick-Ass 2 may follow The Dark Knight’s theory of supervillains following the superhero into existence.
But, to go back on myself, the most striking point here is the ass-kicking. Violence is bloody, brutal and realistic. Well, the actions themselves are all action movie choreography, but the results are realistic — bloody and brutally so. Kick-Ass gets broken his first time out… which, fortunately, and fully in-keeping with the superhero-origins story, leaves him with a half-metal skeleton and the ability to feel no pain. “Cool,” as he probably says.
This example characterises the film’s attempts to have its cake and eat it. While it does the whole “being a superhero would be a nightmare” thing early on, we then meet Big Daddy and Hit-Girl, who are unfeasible pros, and Kick-Ass himself improves too. It gets to criticise the unlikelihood of the premise and the extremity of the violence, before later revelling in it itself. On the other hand, it’s so much fun that maybe this doesn’t matter — director Matthew Vaughn certainly knows his way round an action sequence, 
and the humour keeps rolling too — so the (arguably) topsy-turvy themes of the tale ultimately serve as a “downbeat good-for-nothing makes good” story arc.
Not that the mass of negative reviews seem to notice this anyway — they’re too busy being outraged at the swearing uttered by and violence enacted on a young girl. I speak, of course, of the likes of Christopher Tookey (don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him — he writes in the Daily Mail) and Roger Ebert, both of whom lambasted the film for its moral vacuity. They’re not the only ones, just some of the most high-profile (on the other side of the fence, plenty of reviews didn’t miss the point, but they’re less interesting at the moment). Is it low to suggest Ebert & co are too old to ‘get’ Kick-Ass? Probably; especially as some of the other critics who hated it are suitably young. But I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that not all their arguments hold weight; that some of their reactions were too simplistic.
Reviews like the Daily Mail’s would have us believe the film is all about the glorification of extreme violence and sexualisation of 11-year-old girls. Some have read this as Tookey being a paedophile — how else would he spot something others didn’t, unless he were aroused by it himself? Tookey, naturally, denies such things (he’s posted a long whiney “I’m being internet bullied!” article online, 
trying to lump himself in with those unfortunate souls who’ve suffered the emotional consequences of genuine internet bullying). I fall between the two camps on this one — that is to say, Tookey’s probably not a paedophile, but nor does the film set out to entice them. Vaughn said he cast Hit-Girl young to avoid sexualising her; if he’d cast a more physically developed 15-year-old, she would’ve been more suspect.
If anything, the film works to confront its audience with notions like this. Is Hit-Girl sexy? She’s 11, you perv! Is getting into fights fun? Not when you get the crap kicked out of you! Is being captured by the enemy, ready to be unmasked on the internet, just a chance for a cool escape? Not when you get burnt alive. Slowly. Is this highly-trained uber-assassin the Coolest Killer Ever? Not when a grown man is beating up a little girl. Vaughn & co (by which I mean original author Mark Miller and co-screenwriter Jane Goldman) start from a place of “this doesn’t work” (having their cake), then they do make it cool (eating it), but then they tear it back down again (I can’t think of a pleasant analogy now).
But, unlike their characters, they don’t tear it down with a baseball bat around the audiences’ head; by which I mean, they don’t spell it out in big idiot-friendly letters — “do you see why this is wrong? Do you see? Let me tell you again…” Instead, they let what occurs speak for itself. OK, the good guys do win in the end, and in a rather cool way — but would it be a more complete moral message if the grown man killed the little girl; if the hero got blown up by the bazooka? Perhaps it would; I don’t know; personally, I like it the way it is.
Am I saying experienced, respected critics like Ebert and Tookey (well, he’s experienced) are too thick to see subtext that I’ve noticed? For once, I suppose I am (though I certainly don’t claim to be alone in noticing it). Am I treating the filmmakers with more intelligence than they deserve? I don’t think so; I think Ebert, Tookey & co have assumed they’re dumber than they are, and in the process made themselves look a bit dimmer. I think they’ve been blinded by the comic-booky roots (their defence, “but I’ve liked some comic book films!”, is beside the point), the extreme situations the film presents — and there’s no doubt that the violence and swearing from such young characters
are deliberately extreme and provocative (but for a reason) — and the potential for audiences to misread the whole thing as “just cool”, and so have misread it themselves, as “just perverse”. I think that does the film a disservice.
My initial reaction — besides “wow this is a fun watch!” — was that Kick-Ass walks a tightrope between its initial “what if someone really tried to be a superhero?” premise and the visceral pleasures of taking it to the level of “what if someone succeeded at being a superhero?” But the more I consider it, the more I think this is part of the point — it never, really, goes fully ‘right’. As I’ve said, the good guys win and the bad guys lose, but there are casualties and hard-fought battles along the way. Yes, it thoroughly abandons its “this is the real world” premise by the final act, but the film as a whole leads you there step by step. Is this a flaw, or sneaky filmmaking pulling (or attempting to pull) the wool over our eyes? Does it matter?
It’s an ideological minefield, that’s for sure, and perhaps some would rather it more blatantly faced up to this than it does. Others would clearly rather it didn’t ever raise such issues. Has it dodged them, or has it left them for the audience to consider? I think it’s clear I believe the latter; that most of the negative reviews are too busy being angry to notice they were made to think (or were meant to); sadly, some viewers will be too busy thinking “woah, cool” to have thought at all, which just vindicates those naysayers in their own mind. This latter group are clearly the ones the critics are worried about, but why should every film cater to the lowest common denominator of intellectual ability, 
or be wary that every viewer might be a paedophile or violent psycho?
And even leaving all that aside, even treating it as “just a comic book movie”, Kick-Ass has something significant to offer. By using various other superhero movies and TV series as its starting point, but grounding them in (a version of) the real world — with attendant debates about violence etc — Kick-Ass fills a void in need of filling. By which I mean: as Watchmen was to superhero comics, so Kick-Ass is to superhero films.
Kick-Ass is released on DVD & Blu-ray in the US today, and in the UK on 6th September.
It came 1st on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2010, which can be read in full here.
Get Smart, as you likely know, was a TV series in the ’60s, which makes one wonder how it’s taken so long to get to the big screen. I guess it didn’t have the same fanbase or perceived relaunchability that led to an endless array of big-screen versions of ’60s/’70s series in the last decade or two — 
there’s a few action sequences that are surprisingly decent too, considering this is still primarily a comedy.
to be the smarmy big shot who either ignores or specifically brings down a character like Carrell’s, but instead he’s one of his biggest supporters. (That he turns out to have been A Bad Guy All Along, Gasp! is beside the point.) The office bullies don’t actually have any power at all and are frequently brought down to size. It makes a nice change from the stock sitcom clumsy-hero-who-eventually-comes-good with irritating-and-condescending-higher-ups on the side, the pedestrian and unenjoyable fallback of too many comedy writers.
but it’s asking a little too much from not necessarily sympathetic viewers.
I realised recently that I haven’t seen an animated Disney film produced after 
(It’s this kind of thing that has caused uproar for 
“Oh my God, what have they done to Sherlock Holmes?!” Etc etc. By this point you’re likely to have heard the arguments that Guy Ritchie’s blockbuster re-imagining of the Great Detective is actually based on all sorts of references and allusions in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original works, so I won’t go over them again here. Indeed, I’m not even convinced they’re relevant in the first place.
The way to this climax offers a good mix of detecting, action and humour. It’s not pure Holmes then, but it’s not pure blockbuster either. Downey Jr brings some of his Tony Stark magic, but his take on Holmes is still distinct, not just because of his faultless English accent. His madness, obsession and genius are all well portrayed, and Ritchie’s direction matches it beautifully.
Mark Strong’s villain is suitably chilling, aided by the film’s irreverence: if they can make Holmes into a quip-dealing action man, maybe there really is something supernatural at work? To reveal the truth would spoil that proper climax. The closest to a weak link is Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler. I like McAdams well enough generally, and here too, but she may still be a little out of her depth — they’ve gone for a Pretty Young Thing when someone a little older may’ve suited better.
Ritchie brings something special to the director’s chair too, believe it or not — you may think he’s sold out into blockbusterdom to revive his flagging and repetitive career, but the touches he brings suggest the mind of someone who has control of his material, his camera and his edit, and wants to use them all to try something a bit different, not just another hack-for-hire who could churn out any old template-hewn action/adventure flick.
From the company that brought you such pinnacles of cinematic excellence as 
But, in The Asylum’s favour, their Sherlock Holmes doesn’t hide what it is. Yes, it’s called simply Sherlock Holmes rather than Sherlock Holmes and the Implausible CGI Monsters, but at least said monsters are plastered all over the DVD cover (both US and UK). If you see that and still expect something faithful to Conan Doyle, more fool you. That said, at times it’s surprisingly faithful to Doyle’s spirit. There’s some decent-ish investigation and deduction, the story structured like a mystery rather than an action-adventure.
Anachronisms abound, the best being the first: the film opens in London, 1940, the middle of the Blitz, and the opening shot foregrounds the Millennium Bridge. I don’t think you have to be too familiar with London to know when that was built. Elsewhere we get intercoms on houses, incongruous light switches and period inaccurate telephones, just to mention a couple. It’s shoddy, yes, but almost part of the fun.
Is 1945-1998 actually a film? Or is it a piece of video Art? Or just another online video?
attention didn’t already wander, that is). There are ultimately so many flashes and bleeps, and the effect is so lulling, that I had to force myself to remember these represented Big Nasty Bombs that were Not A Good Thing. Perhaps something more aurally grating would’ve been appropriate; the counter argument going that this would cause even more viewers to abandon the work.
Is Anybody There? has been described as “lightweight” in some reviews. Tosh and piffle — I don’t think that’s true in the slightest, and it’s left this rather excellent film to be distinctly underrated.
initially antagonistic relationship merges seamlessly into a deep friendship and respect; one that doesn’t go unchallenged, but survives it all to make them both better people.
It’s a well-balanced film that hits that genuinely realistic note: life is rarely all comedy or all tragedy, and more often than not the most hilarious moments are locked up inside the most unbearable. It’s a truth a few more drama writers could productively learn, instead of remaining so insufferably po-faced because they’re creating a Serious And Meaningful Dramatic Work.
I was a bit of a gamer once. Not an especially hardcore one, but certainly a gamer. And I remember Max Payne, and I remember enjoying it, and I remember thinking it would make quite a good film, and I remember one of the biggest problems being that what made it so unique as a game was the bullet-time feature and what would make it so derivative as a film would be to use bullet-time. But it also had lots of other things going for it: the snow-bound nighttime New York setting, the dark revenge plot, the hard-boiled gravel-toned voiceover.
Unfortunately, he seems to be under the illusion that a couple of barely-moving slow-mo moments also stand in for a full action sequence. When an action movie can’t deliver any action, there’s a problem.
The ‘harder’ bit merely comes from a couple of frames (literally) of violence and the odd bit of CG blood. Presumably the extra walking around is to artificially lengthen the running time and persuade the more gullible that they’re getting a tougher experience.
At least some of it looks quite nice. The drifting snow-laden exterior shots are among the few bits of the film that might genuinely be considered good. But when you can get pretty images elsewhere, why suffer through this?
In the special features on The International’s Blu-ray, director Tom Tykwer comments that architecture is a focus of his when making a film. It certainly shows here: there are many, many lingering shots of buildings (and just about everything else, actually), all very modern, with straight, clean, crisp lines. The cinematography matches it in pin-sharp perfection, which at least means the Blu-ray image is a pleasure to watch. The film itself, however, is a little dull.
Not that her continued presence would’ve improved the film’s final act. The ultimate resolution is half brave and half cop-out: the goodies fail in bringing the baddies down, the film explicit in the fact that such business will always continue; and yet most of the baddies are dispatched, one way or another, and a closing array of newspaper headlines serves to imply that the law got the Big Bad Bank after all. As “have your cake and eat it” endings go, it’s a damp squib.
The filmmaking skill Tykwer exhibits during this one action sequence, plus the beauty with which he shoots international scenery, suggests he’s the perfect director to take over the Bourne franchise (should that rumble on). He already seems to be borrowing from it, including the choice to underscore all his long, slow shots with punchy, driving music, as if this in itself will give the film some dynamism. It doesn’t. Though The International may occasionally remind you of that trilogy, then, it doesn’t come close in the entertainment stakes.
Pale Rider is, in many ways, a pretty stock Western. The plot is likely to be familiar even to those who haven’t seen a great deal of the genre: remote community, where some controlling business-type is making life hard for a bunch of everyday poor grafters; in rides a mysterious stranger, who sees the injustice of the situation; when peaceful methods don’t work, there’s the climactic shoot-out; and the mysterious stranger finally rides into the sunset/from whence he came/forever on.
but the person he has in mind is dead… and yet, when they come face to face, the marshall repeatedly utters, “it is you”.
the only particularly memorable role is Sydney Penny’s naïve young teenager, Megan. Her shifting emotions and variable actions are perhaps the only parts of the story one can’t necessarily see coming from the off.
100Films.co.uk 