Sgt. Angle reporting for duty!

I suppose it’s only natural that I must cover the fantastic Kick-Ass, released this weekend to take an approximate haul of $19.75 million to place second behind…How to Train Your Dragon(?!).

HTTYD is a boat load of buckets of fun. But I have a good feeling that a good chunk of Dragon’s haul this weekend had to do with youngin’s purchasing tickets in order to sneak into Kick-Ass while their parents enjoyed ice cream with false ideas about what movie their kids were really seeing.

Hit Girl X 2…a menace?

Kick-Ass is currently the proud owner of controversy thanks to mega-critics like Roger Ebert’s one-star review of the movie, saying, “[Kick-Ass] regards human beings like video-game targets. Kill one, and you score. They’re dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie’s home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.”

I’ve been having a hard time with this “case” since seeing the film on Friday. On the one hand, Ebert has a point. American films have always reveled in extreme violence (despite this being written and directed by Brits). On the other hand…well, many cultures have films or stories with children as protagonists, strong and almost untouchable fighters kicking butt and showing no mercy. Normally, though, these kids punch and kick without a spot of blood in sight.

Hit Girl is, ultimately, a strong female character, something writer Jane Goldman proudly declared at Wondercon a few weeks ago. She is strong because her strength is not based on her sexuality, but in her ability to defend herself, her resilience in the face of the violence she encounters, and because, at heart, she is still a human being — despite rarely flinching at the sight of blood, or the death she causes.

In the end, Hit Girl’s life turns out to not be the game she’d been hoping for, yet she is fulfilled, at the young age of 12, with the satisfaction that only mature adults usually reach. Sure, in the world of the story, she’ll probably grow up with some issues that will never go away. But chalk that up to basic humanity in a very unbasic universe, the future of which we may never see, but only hope will be.

And that, my friends, is what movies are — or should be — all about. They should bring into question our very own concerns and fears, for the characters and for ourselves, and hope that the characters we care about — even just a little bit, even if they’re covered with blood — will turn out to face their flaws and outgrow them.

The extreme violence in Kick-Ass is really nothing new to cinema. See, for example, A Clockwork Orange, Irreversible, or even the very recent Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In all of these films, rape, murder, and beatings are all shown in various amounts of graphic detail. In the great Korean film Oldboy, a man seeking revenge doles a heavy dose of ultra-violence out to his former captors, pulling teeth and harshly beating a set of jailers at one point. Of that film, Ebert said, “We are so accustomed to “thrillers” that exist only as machines for creating diversion that it’s a shock to find a movie in which the action, however violent, makes a statement and has a purpose.”

Using this statement, can we say beyond any doubt that Kick-Ass contains violence “with a purpose”? Perhaps. Perhaps we can say that American culture is so numb to the true effects of violence — because of movies, television, and comics — that when children beat, shoot and kill, we look at them in the same way we see adults. Is it possible for an 11-year-old girl to kill without remorse? Maybe. But that is one messed up girl.

And maybe that’s the point. That for all the colors, the quirky lines, the comic relief, and the just plain fun factor of Kick-Ass, there really is a deeper current underneath that seeks to resonate with audiences after the fact (despite Vaughn just making the movie for fun). Violence is not okay. The movie itself points a finger at the fact that “no one has tried to be a superhero” in reality — simply because it cannot be done, that there is too much to lose and not enough to justify it. The risk is too great, the violence is too painful, and the psychological effect is overwhelming at the least.

Only a puff of violence

Other comic book adaptations — Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman — generally adhere to the cartoonish violence that their print counterparts embody — the none-too-bloody beatings, the simply stunned instead of killed footsoldiers of the villain. Even The Dark Knight, the film responsible for the future of comic book adaptations, left a lot of the violence off-screen or non-existent. Perhaps that’s because of the nature of Batman’s character, or maybe it was Warner Bros. insistence on a PG-13 rating.

Nevertheless, Kick-Ass was a film that was not financed by any American studio, and Lionsgate only picked it up for distribution after it was already in the can. To be clear, on the page, it was thought too violent and unmarketable. On screen, it’s visually satisfying and portrays a director at one with his craft, and is good enough to feed to an audience for mass consumption. But I digress…

Hit Girl embodies the ideal superhero, the one who is born that way, who has been trained, and can actually succeed at surviving and succeeding. But at what cost? (Those who’ve seen the movie will know). The moment it no longer becomes a game (and although she claims at one point that she never plays, life for her thus far has only been a colorful shoot’em’up) is the moment she’ll have to drop everything and grow up, to save her powers for only the most necessary moments, if they should ever rise. Vengeance does not a hero make. Neither does stupidity or just plain violence. The true hero of the film, Kick-Ass, learns this the hard way. He becomes a hero when he is most needed, when he finally understands what makes a hero. It is this point that Hit Girl only barely touches in the film, and perhaps will come to fully realize in later installments…

We can only hope.

You are dismissed!

Sgt. Angle