Kick Ass (Cannot Rate)

Kick-Ass is to Iron Man as indie comics are to Marvel. Not nearly so shiny. Not nearly sleek, with A LOT less money on the graphics, the marketing, and the presentation. And, along with that, a lot more freedom to tell the kind of story the artist wants to tell, and to tell it as down-and-dirty as he likes. Aaron Johnson is a 16-year-old loser who hangs out with his nerdy friends at comic books shops when he isn’t ogling is English teacher, getting rejected by his hottie locker neighbor (Lyndsy Fonseca), or surfing the web and engaging in the activities that tends to incite in adolescent males. To his credit, he decides to inject his life with a little more excitement so he orders a wetsuit and starts administering vigilante justice as superhero Kick-Ass. Problem is, he can’t come close to living up to his name. This leads Fonseca to take him in as her gay best friend, easily my favorite sub-plot as she invites him over for sleepovers, waxing parties, and general drive-a-straight-kid-crazy activities. He’s about to give up on the whole super-hero enterprise when a cell phone video of an attempted mugging intercession goes viral, making him a youtube phenom while getting the attention of local crime boss Mark Strong.

Enter Chloe Moretz (kid sister from 500 Days of Summer) as Hit-Girl and Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy. While Kick-Ass is doing a bit of vigilante justice, Hit-Girl shows up, drops the “C-word” and starts slicing and dicing gangstas while Cage supervises from a scope across the street. Seems Big Daddy has been training the 12-year-old to avenge her mother’s death in knives, guns, hand-to-hand combat, and sword play. Cage is his pre-plugs loose-canon, nut-job best, but there’s something a bit sickening about watching a father unload a clip on his little girl to show her the beauty of Kevlar. The rest of the plot goes more-or-less like you might think. Johnson gets in over his head, Hit-Girl and Big Daddy help him out, but compromise themselves in the process, hard-core, Matrix-inspired fight scenes ensue, and Johnson gets the girl.

There’s a lot to like in here. The fight scenes really are phenomenal. The set-up is original, believable (well, until the father-daughter act kicks up), and highly entertaining. The dialogue is fresh and funny, just nailing the angst of nerdy-smart-high-schoolers who know their days are coming. But there are some places I can’t go and the violence and sexualizing of a 12-year-old girl is one of them. This thing is a pedophiles dream like nothing since Natalie Portman in Leon. Moretz runs around in super-hero outfits when she’s not in a school-girl one. She gets shot, punched, beat, and thrown down so hard at one point you think she must have broke her back. She’s 12, mind you. She’s not an adult trapped in a 12-year-olds body or a Small Wonder-style robot who happens to appear 12. She is a pre-pubescent little girl fashioned by her father to be a killer who drops the C-word, violent impales men, causes a 17-year-old to say “I’m going to wait on that girl”, and generally is treated like an adult. The Japanese, leaders in the fetishization of everything, having been playing with this (and much more disturbing) uses of girls for a while in their anime. They generally assume that, if kids aren’t hurt in the production, no worries. But, they’re wrong for that. What’s more, they aren’t part of the most violent developed culture on the planet where this type of behavior towards children is far too common. For this reason, I can’t rate this movie nor endorse it.