Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Kick-Ass (2010)

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Marc Strong, Chloe Grace Moretz, Nicholas Cage
Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Dave Lizewski (Taylor-Johnson) wants to be a superhero. He makes himself a costume and gives himself a name, Kick-Ass. He tries fighting crime. His first time out he gets the crap beaten out of him and winds up in the hospital. One by-product of his recuperative surgery seems to be that he no longer feels pain. So, he picks up where he left off. He has trouble finding any crime to fight until one night he stumbles across three guys beating up another guy. Someone sees him take them on, catches the whole thing on video and before you know he is an internet sensation.

Katie, one of Dave's high school classmates, asks Kick-Ass to tell this guy she's been seeing, Rasul, that its over. Rasul is a drug dealer. Kick-Ass goes over to tell Rasul off. Kick-Ass almost gets his ass kicked until another superhero of sorts, Hit Girl (Moretz), shows up. She kills Rasul and all his followers and takes the money she finds laying about. Hit Girl is much younger than Kick-Ass, she probably isn't more than 10 years old. She has been trained by her father (Cage) who dresses kind of like Batman but goes by Big Daddy.

All this superhero action does not go unnoticed by Frank D'Amico (Strong), a local mobster and the father of Chris D'Amico (Mintz-Plasse), a classmate of Dave. He doesn't believe what his men are telling him at first. Once they have photographic evidence he decides that something has to be done about Kick-Ass. Hit Girl and Big Daddy are the biggest thorns in Frank's side but he doesn't know that.

Frank spots Kick-Ass on the street. He follows him into an alley and then kills him. Turns out that the man he killed was someone impersonating Kick-Ass. Chris, Frank's son, has an idea about how to catch Kick-Ass. His father is skeptical but agrees to bankroll his idea. Chris gets a car and a uniform and pretends to be a superhero named the Red Mist. He gets Kick-Ass to meet him. Neither one recognizes the other with their masks on.

They go to investigate a call for help that Red Mist received. It is actually a trap but when they arrive there the place is on fire and Frank's men are all dead. Chris had planted a nanny cam in the place and shows the footage to his father. Big Daddy is the one who killed Frank's men.

Kick-Ass reveals his secret identity to Katie. They start dating. He stops fighting crime because she is concerned for his safety. This lasts until he gets a call from the Red Mist. He meets with him. The Red Mist wants to meet the other superheroes Kick-Ass knows. He takes them to Big Daddy and Hit Girl. It is another trap. Red Mist shoots Hit Girl. Big Daddy and Kick-Ass are taken prisoner by Frank's men.

They put the two heroes on a live stream which gets picked up by the local news stations. The two heroes are handcuffed to chairs. The gangsters proceed to beat them. It doesn't look good until Hit Girl shows up. She kills all the bad men but before she can get them all they light Big Daddy on Fire. He dies from the burns just after she finally gets to him.

Hit Girl and Kick-Ass return to her lair where they pick up a lot of weapons and then head to Frank D'Amico's building. Hit Girl does most of the work but Kick-Ass shows up at a crucial moment and saves her, not once, but twice. The Red Mist survives but Frank and all of his men are killed. The movie ends with no one having figured out who Hit Girl, Kick-Ass, or the Red Mist really are. Kick-Ass and the Red Mist still don't know one another's secret identities or that they are classmates.

Overall it was a fun watch. The violence was over the top and cartoonish. There's a decent mix of serious and silly. It definitely isn't for everyone.

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