Kick-Ass

The price a boy has to pay for trying to be a masked vigilante is gay or bi allegations every now and then. (I thought the fight scenes were really well choreographed and a lot of the shots had really nice colour and composition. I chuckled at a few jokes and felt like the acting was smooth and natural.  However, I don’t think I actually cared for a single character or any of their interpersonal relationships. Additionally, the main bad guys in the first half of this movie were a couple groups of random black men with maybe gang affiliations (?), that the main characters brutally attack and kill, and considering this movie has an all-white main cast, I was definitely raising my eyebrow a little bit at this choice.  I have not read the source material for what this movie was based on, and maybe it’s because it’s been 15 years since this movie came out, but I also did not find the supposed deconstruction of the superhero genre to be all that interesting either, in fact I found this movie to be exceptionally cliché. In my opinion, the biggest difference between Kick-ass and other super hero movies, is that the main character, in this, is annoying, un-sympathetic and pretty fucking useless (I don’t think he actually accomplishes anything of note as a superhero, besides beating up one guy and getting kidnapped). He also makes a big deal about how much of a horny, perverted, masturbator teenager he is during the first minute of introduction, but he’s not even that horny in the rest of the movie! Not that I necessarily want to be watching a highschooler with a perpetual hard-on, but when 2/3 of the character introduction time is spent watching him jerk off to porn on his computer, while he narrates about how much of a freak gooner he is, you expect this supposed core characteristic to play a bigger role in the story.)