Kick-Ass (2010)
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Dave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan who one day decides to become a super-hero, even though he has no powers, training or meaningful reason to do so.
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46 films that influenced Kick-Ass
What critics say influenced Kick-Ass
If this is the case, then director/co-writer Matthew Vaughn is REALLY flattering Quentin Tarantino and his gore-fest called “Kill Bill.” “Kick-Ass” is not for the fainthearted with its copious violent fights, graphic mayhem and lots of blood.
On pense à cette scène de fusillade délirante tournée à la première personne, aux lignes de dialogues sorties tout droit de Scarface, à cet adieu calqué sur la finale de Return of the Jedi et, bien évidemment, à cet hommage on ne peut plus senti à Kill Bill lors d’une finale époustouflante au cours de laquelle le réalisateur se sera même permis d’imiter Tarantino en allant piger dans le registre du compositeur Ennio Morricone.
Hit Girl is like a third-grade version of Uma Thurman's limb-chopping "Kill Bill" protagonist, with slightly harsher language.
They were and I get that and if you question your willingness to suspend disbelief not unlike the way you did at the violence in “Kill Bill” or “Battle Royale,” then this movie is for and it delivers for that demographic on every single level.
The best that the film's fêted violence sequences can achieve is to rip-off the work of Quentin Tarantino (Vaughn goes so far as to use an Ennio Morricone cue from For a Few Dollars More ), though with neither the cartoon elegance of Kill Bill nor the apocalyptic energy of Inglourious Basterds .
On the other hand, he’s probably flattered – the double-blade wielding Hit Girl, in her purple Clara Bow wig and pleated skirt, is like a “Mini-Me” version of Uma Thurman in “ Kill Bill .”
In that pursuit, it's astonishingly satisfying that Vaughn namedrops every single reference, with a Hellboy poster decorating our heroes' favourite hangout, a proper paid to Tim Burton's Batman, and Tangerine Dream's haunted score from Risky Business used during an outré sex scene--a bravura show of knowing precisely what jerks the prurience in the pleasure principle for people hitting the sweet spot of thirtysomething.
In "Kick-Ass," an action-comedy about real-world superheroes with no powers, but plenty of attitude, Nicolas Cage uses the same halting, pompous intonations Adam West did to intimidate bad guys in the 1960s " Batman " TV show.
This time out, the actor has swiped Adam West’s diction from the old “Batman’’ TV series as Big Daddy grudgingly accepts Kick-Ass into his and Hit-Girl’s gruesome revenge plot.
Cage can be the kiss of death to many a movie, but here, he's a blast to watch on screen especially in his Big Daddy guise where his idea of an intimidating superhero voice is channeling Adam West's "Batman" from the lighthearted, but goofy 1966 TV series.
Later, she describes a Batman -style signal that the mayor flashes in the sky to summon superheroic aid: "It's in the shape of a giant cock."
Apart from its gasp-inducing hilarity, it marks a welcome return to form for Nicolas Cage, who portrays the hulking vigilante Big Daddy in the halting, campy cadences of Adam West in the old "Batman" TV series.
No one except Quentin Tarantino, the director Vaughn most obviously apes, is better at matching action-film set piece to music, even if Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” still works better in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971).
Il s’agit également d’un domaine où Kick-Ass prouve une fois de plus toute sa perspicacité, utilisant toujours ses citations avec une intention bien définie, tel ce recours à une pièce de Rossini utilisée jadis par un certain Kubrick dans A Clockwork Orange qui viendra appuyer ici un tout autre contexte d’ultra-violence.
Strip it of its rude behavior and more graphic violence and it's basically just a lower-budgeted retelling of " Spider-Man ."
He's basically Peter Parker with a hard-on, an impression that's reinforced by the way Vaughn is practically doing a pastiche of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" during the first act of "Kick-Ass", from the voice-over narration to the colorful cinematography and, for better or worse, the rather slow pacing and the abundant amounts of exposition.
Gleefully dissecting the hero worship that turns men in tights into cultural icons in the first place while also becoming a great action movie in its own right, “Kick-Ass” starts as an awkward teen comedy not unlike “Superbad” meets “Spider-Man” but becomes an action-adventure classic that simply demolishes so many of the recent Marvel Universe movies that dare call themselves heroic.
The movie, about a dorky teen (Aaron Johnson) who suits up in a costume and calls himself Kick-Ass, has its origins in where else? a comic book, written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita Jr. (whose father drew Spider-Man back in the 60s).
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When Lerner and Loewe wrote and composed the song "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" for the 1958 musical "Gigi," it's a safe bet they weren't referring to someone like the pint-sized, foul-mouthed, guns-blazing 11-year-old Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) in "Kick-Ass."
The film's admiration doesn't just extend to comics, as Vaughn pays homage to Martin Scorsese (the mobsters are Goodfellas refugees and Dave's heated mirror chats with himself are like Travis Bickle's).
All those exhausted, lazy comparisons to Tarantino are actually justified by Kick-Ass; it's not just homage, it's reinvention--what A Fistful of Dollars is to Yojimbo, Kick-Ass is to Hard-Boiled.
In the case of Kick-Ass, it only served to remind me what a great R-rated movie "Sin City" is.
The film wittily references Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Frank Miller's Sin City, and Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores (among many other films, TV shows, music, and comics).
What makes it different from "Sin City" or the "Kill Bill" movies is that it features Hit Girl, a moppet who swears like Joe Pesci and turns villains into corpses by the dozen: a tween Tarantino.
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Both are throwbacks in a way—Cage channels Adam West’s portrayal of Batman in the ’60s, while Moretz brings Natalie Portman in The Professional to mind—and, by the time we meet them, we’ve all but abandoned the notion that the world in which the film takes place is anywhere as real as we’re told it is.
When a preteen Natalie Portman costarred in the sadistic action film “The Professional,” her presence had a smarmy-porny quality that was much remarked upon and which one can only hope the director, Luc Besson , did not intend.
Connections to The Professional (aka Leon) notwithstanding, Moretz displays the precise level of confidence of a young Natalie Portman and we can look forward to big things from her in the future.
The film wittily references Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Frank Miller's Sin City, and Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores (among many other films, TV shows, music, and comics).