After watching Kick Ass the first time I thought it was fantastic so I immediately watched it a second time.
The second time I watched it, I didn't like it as much. Flaws always become more visible when you watch a movie a second time, because it's harder to be as engrossed in the story when you know what's going to happen. But I don't think I've ever been brought down to earth this much on a second viewing before.
Here's why.
I couldn't help noticing, that the origin story of the two superheroes, Big Daddy and Hit Girl (real name Mindy), is LAME. These particular superheros have sworn bloody revenge on the crime boss Frank D'Amico and they spend the movie brutally killing their way through his gang members, aiming to eventually kill him. Hit Girl is Big Daddy's daughter and he has trained her to carry out the same brutal vigilante justice as him.
The reason for this, according to Big Daddy, is that he used to be a cop until Frank D'Amico framed him as a drug dealer and sent him to jail for approximately five years. D'Amico did this because he was concerned that Daddy would find evidence against him and have him locked up. While Daddy was in prison, his wife, who was pregnant with Mindy at the time, was unable to cope without him and committed suicide.
The problem here is that we're being positioned to blame D'Amico for the wife's death, even though it isn't his fault. Even by Daddy's own account there is no evidence that D'Amico knew that his wife was pregnant. And even if he had known she was pregnant, he can't reasonably conclude just from that information, that she's going to kill herself if her spouse goes to jail. At most he would have had the ability to vaguely forsee hard times, but not suicide. So in relation to what happened to the wife, there's no real evidence that I should even dislike D'Amico, let alone agree to kill him and all his men.
Plus, D'Amico's idea to have Daddy sent to prison doesn't seem gratuitously sadistic. D'Amico's a crime boss, so he presumably could have had Daddy killed, if he'd really wanted to. Instead he's chosen an option that is pragmatic without being sadistic. This origin story which is meant to make me hate D'Amico actually proves that he's not such a bad guy, considering the ugly line of business that he's in.
If we're supposed to think of Big Daddy and Hit Girl as heroes for killing D'Amico and all his men, like this movie implies, D'Amico SHOULD have done something horrendous. Something so bad that Daddy departs from his ideal of obeying the law, and decides
that operating outside the law to bring D'Amico down is necessary. If the movie doesn't show us that, then the heroes are not really heroes. They're just people who are going on a killing spree because they're
pissed off.
It's harder to enjoy the movie when you realise you've been given no real justification for anything that was happening. This origin story is meant to be the justification for killing dozens of D'Amico's men throughout the movie, as well as killing D'Amico himself, and it clearly fails. D'Amico isn't responsible for anything other than sending Daddy to jail for five years.
The other scene in this movie that bothers me the most, is the scene where Hit Girl kills all of the gangsters at Rasul's apartment whom work for Frank D'Amico. What makes this scene particularly disturbing is that she also kills the woman in the red dress who does not appear to be a gangster, and is clearly not a threat. In fact, she was running away from Hit Girl when Hit Girl killed her.
This makes supporting Daddy and Hit Girl even more indefensible because this is a much, much worse crime, than the crime that sparked their origin story in the first place. Framing Daddy as a drug dealer involved no innocent people being murdered.
And what's frustrating is that I loved everything else about this movie. I found the whole thing to be very gripping, entertaining and amusing. So the fact that the heroes are clearly deranged psychos if you think about it for a couple of seconds can only be hugely disappointing.
Especially since this movie consistantly implies that it should be taken seriously, by depicting much of the movie realistically. It depicts the superheroes as having only weapons and no superpowers. It makes Dave's character as much like an everyman it possibly can. It sets the story in New York rather than a fictional city like Gotham. It refers to the fact that until these superheros came along there were no real life superheroes.
A movie shouldn't take itself this seriously and then make the heroes psychopaths!
