stories from the Realm

When I first walked out of the theater after seeing Kick-Ass, I didn’t quite know what to think. After mulling over the film a bit more, I know why part of me didn’t like it: the director tried so hard to make the movie grounded in reality (this is, after all, a movie about a high schooler who decides to become a superhero) that the violence in the film is disturbing.

In your typical superhero movie, no one would have batted an eyelash at the violent acts the main characters committed. The kind of killing that Hit-Girl does in Kick-Ass is almost comically tame compared to a movie like, I don’t know, The Punisher, which features stone-cold murders and a couple of brutal fight scenes. But because these are “real people,” in Kick-Ass, acting out the superhero fantasy in “real life,” the audience sees the violence as truly disturbing.

It is precisely this factor that makes me like this movie so much.

Kick-Ass is not, in any way, your typical superhero movie. It’s saying something, in an uncomfortable way. We cringe at the violent acts that Hit-Girl commits — which in turn begs the following question: why are we okay with similar violence in a movie like Crank or Spiderman or The Incredible Hulk, but not okay with what Hit-Girl does?

Kick-Ass simultaneously mocks and imitates the thing it’s trying to critique. It’s a satire of a satire. In some ways, it’s a superhero movie, but it also calls into question the moral ambiguity that many superhero movies present. The decisions are always made in fights — even when the Bad Guys and Good Guys are clearly delineated, they still have to duke it out with their fists. And we, the audience, accept this violence. We go along for the ride. Here is a movie that questions that tendency.

I also admire the fact that Hit-Girl was a female character who kills just as well as the bad boys, without it needing to be sexual. (Although many people have pointed out that it was her father, her literal patriarch, who molded her into a killing machine — which is indeed creepy.)

And let’s face it: nobody would be decrying Hit-Girl’s violent acts were it not for the fact that the character is an 11-year-old girl. If this were an 11-year-old boy? Nobody would care. We have already seen 11-year-old boys do worse things on the silver screen.

These are pretty brief thoughts.

Anyway, I hereby declare myself a member of the Women’s Ass-Kicking Committee.

(Image via Marvel)