Kick-Ass Survives Despite Weakness

(Spoiler Alert)

By all accounts, Kick-ass was a well respected movie to most fans. A promising showing of 76% on RottenTomatoes.com and a worldwide Box office gross of a near 100 million smackers. Expect to see several Big Daddies and Hit Girls marching the block this Halloween. But despite a hardy following of enthusiasm from audiences, there were major problems in the story, and only by hitting fresh territory did they survive potential pitfalls.

Once again we go back to the classic story term: the inciting incident. It's really why the movie starts. Why now is all of this happening? Spider-man gets bite by a radio-active spider and Batman gets thrown into action when a maniacal villain surfaces. But Kick-Ass? He doesn't have powers. And he doesn't have a rival villain in this movie. So why does he put on the suit and start his campaign? Why now does this story take place?

There is no actual answer and it's this primary flaw that hurts the movie. After introducing our hero Dave Lizewski as a regular zero awaiting to become a hero, they have the oddest thing happen: Dave's mom drops dead in the kitchen due to a brain aneurism. But what could have been a motivator that drives this frustrated and helpless teenager to try to regain some control in his life is immediately squashed. Dave explains "So if you were hoping for any 'I will avenge you mother', you're out of luck. In the eighteen months since my mother died, the only epiphany I had was realizing that life just goes on." We see Dave eating cereal 18 months later, with his life going along perfectly normal and status quo.

Then he randomly comes up with the idea to become a superhero. He orders a suit, tries it out, trains himself, and after some fateful run-ins with average hoods, he becomes a viral web sensation and his superhero license is cemented in public awareness. But by the end, the emotional resonance of the movie shifts to Hit Girl, as she battles for vengeance for Big Daddy's death. Kick-Ass' final act is soft and lackluster. There's no epiphany and we're left with an odd question: Why is he still trying to be a superhero? And the reason we have no answer, we never had it to begin with.

This movie succeeded because it shocked us with gore and violence, it mocked the genre in a fresh way, with great characters like Hit Girl and Big Daddy, and it was the first movie to the theaters to satirize the Superhero movie effectively. But if it wants to continue the franchise with equal success, and follow up Green Hornet and other satires on the way, it better find a better motivation for its hero to don his suit. Because superheroes always don the suit again, and if they don't have powers, then they better have some damn good reason.