Without even having read Ebert's review "morally reprehensible" was the exact phrase that popped into my head while watching this movie. Unlike Ebert I was not convinced by the film's opening as it meticulously and dully went about crossing items off the Nerdy High School Dude cinematic checklist. The only thing setting it apart is just how unattractive the main character is. Between this and Bandslam it appears that the only advances in Nerd Dudes in the years since the '80s is the widening gap of attractiveness between the men and their idolized objects of desire (though Bandslam at least has the courtesy to treat said women as a somewhat close approximation of real people). Those in search of a social trainwreck will be heartened to know that this rote chauvinism paint-by-numbers is, indeed, the least of Kick-Ass' problems.
The main thrust of Kick-Ass is that if superheroes existed in the real world they'd be socially maladjusted nerds and crazy people. This is an obviously fair point to suggest, yet the movie is far more eager to embrace its comic book origins and deal in easy, one-dimensional views of crime and social disarray than it is to satirize notions of hero worship and fantasy. Other than fairly numerous injuries and mishaps nothing is really suggested about the main character's desire for justice. In many ways he's just a teenage rehash of Travis Bickle, seeing the world as a dirty cesspool filled with casual indifference. But the movie is no better, inviting us to laugh and jeer at the deaths of human beings on a regular basis. Tonally, it has no idea where it's at or what it's trying to accomplish. While the main character lacks Bickle's sociopathy, this is eventually made up for via the film's other superheroes -- the father-daughter duo of Big Daddy and Hit Girl. But, much like Taxi Driver, the film can't help romanticizing the characters' iconoclasm and thus becomes problematic whenever it tries to make any real points about their fascism and the blurred, possibly not even there line that separates them from their adversaries.
It's a shame, because Matthew Vaughn has real talent as a visual stylist. Through partial coincidence I ended up watching three action movies in one day and Kick-Ass had by far the best sense of spatial relations and kineticism. The fight scenes, as ugly and squemish as they were conceptually, had a verve and sense of movement I wished existed in a better movie. But, like Michael Bay, Vaughn is likely too entrenched in his own narcissistic adolescence to ever put his visual ideas to use in something that isn't at least somewhat offensive. Unlike Bay, Vaughn is too hip and detached and interested in phony realism to make anything as stupidly sincere and cartoonish as Revenge of the Fallen.
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