A Kick-Ass(Arse) Review

The amount of enjoyment you can derive from watching the movie ‘Kick – Ass’ depends largely on the matter of taste.

Do you fancy yourself a person of discerning taste? Not necessarily pedantic but require that the media you consume have at least some modicum of creative and artistic integrity? If so, do yourself a favour and skip this one.

If, however, you couldn’t fart at much less give two shits about what you consume as entertainment - If you think that ‘2 girls 1cup’ and videos of people throwing stones at kittens in a cramped cage make for perfectly acceptable entertainment - you may enjoy ‘Kick – Ass’, it is also very possible that you are seeing a court appointed psychiatrist after spending time in jail for animal cruelty.

One thing about the movie in particular has come under contention as having crossed the line of being in good taste, stabbed it in the back, forcibly violated its anus then urinated on its corpse, that being the character of Hit-Girl, an ostensibly 11 years old girl who uses the word ‘cunt’, gets beat up by a mafia boss and kills said boss’ minions without any signs of guilt, remorse or emotions except maybe joy.

The use of the expletive is not so much of a big deal to me. This may be because, given the heritage of my country, I usually say ‘Arse’ instead of ‘Ass’. It may also be because Singaporeans are very fond of using the Hokkien name of a female vagina as an insult.
(Surveys have shown that many Singaporeans can’t get any)
I attached female to the front of vagina for the purpose of clarity, you can never be too sure these days.

Roger Ebert, venerated movie critic, singled out the physical abuse of Hit-Girl and while this is certainly not the most comfortable thing to watch, I feel he may have overstated it as the director, in an uncharacteristic display of restraint, only had Hit-Girl suffer a nosebleed as her most grievous injury.

As to the third point of contention, this is one of the extremely rare occasions that I completely agree with the board of censors decision to give this movie an M18 classification.

Although from the unbridled laughs that several scenes elicited from the audience in the theater where I watched the movie I wonder if R21 would be too harsh a label.
These are some of the scenes which the audience found so hilarious.

A boy getting run over by a car after stumbling into the street from having been stabbed by an unsavoury character.

A mafia soldier carelessly tripping over from a shove from Hit-Girl and consequently blowing a hole through the top of his head with a shotgun he happened to be holding.

I don’t remember laughing in that theater.

The movie fails in its own aspirations of being a satire on the comic book movie genre. It makes flippant remarks on Superhero origins, pointing out the ridiculousness of being dropped into toxic waste or being bitten by a radioactive spider only for the protagonist to gain ‘a slightly elevated tolerance for pain’ due to damaged nerve endings from the aforementioned traffic accident.

It lampoons Superheroes’ fortuitous motivations by having the protagonist’s mother die of an aneurism while at the breakfast table, only to later kill off Big-Daddy, Hit-Girl’s father, whose death she dutifully avenges.
(What did Big-Daddy die from anyway? Overload of Pride?)

When the protagonist (whose name I’ve already forgotten) discusses the plausibility of a real Superhero with his friends, they dismiss Super Powers as scientifically untenable and gadgets as logistically impossible. Of course, they conveniently left the Father and Daughter crime fighting duo’s access to weapons and wealth unexplained.

Some may say this is meant as a parody of the genre and of itself, but this is lazy writing and incompetent attempts at comedy at best.

See if you can tell when the following stops being funny.

An overweight man performs a standup routine, he jokes that he eats so much oily food that if he passes out and ends up in a hospital they would have to put him on a drip of bacon fat, he then remarks that he is hungry and pulls out a sausage from the inside of his jacket and proceeds to eat it on stage.
Unfortunately, the ingestion of the sausage is the proverbial last straw and he suffers the proverbial heart attack and promptly dies on stage.

The movie attempts to answer the not-so-original question of what would happen if someone tried to be a Superhero in real life. At first it gave the only logical answer, he wouldn’t do very well, only to realise that there is still an hour and a half of tape left and to fill out the rest of the time became what it was supposed to be a parody of, only it was conscious of being a hypocrite and so it tried to disguise itself in violence, cursing and blood.