kick ass

So I mentioned this week's rental was The Thin Red Line, but a couple of weeks back I actually watched Kick-Ass, so I figured I'd review that first.

I'm not the biggest fan of Mark Millar's comics. I've read a few and he seems quite good at big ideas, but the actual stories tend to lack finesse and always feel a bit artificial, somehow. Take something like Wanted - great idea of the bad guys win and a great power-trip fantasy of loser turns super-assassin, but the actual comics when you read them are a bit thin - things happen too fast, there's too many info dumps and lumps of exposition, the main character never really struggles.

The Wanted film is almost totally different to the comic, as it kinda flips the central concept on its head. In Kick-Ass they've not done that, but they have significantly rewritten it. They've hacked out some of the dodgy bits and given it a more traditional narrative structure, but kept the central concept.

That central concept being why aren't there any real heroes?

Of course, actually there have been a few people who've dressed up in tights and done a bit of vigilantism, but it's a fair enough question.

The answer is actually fairly easy to work out. The vast majority of heroes have superpowers or use magic or have access to impossible technology - that sort of thing. No real world human has that sort of thing.

But then superheroes generally fight supervillains, and those don't exist either, so why would you need the powers if you're going to fight ordinary criminals?

Well the film gives a pretty solid answer to that question as well - because of things like guns and knives and gangs. You'd stand a pretty good chance of getting killed or at least badly maimed. The Punisher probably comes closest to how a real life superhero might work, but he's more like an anti-hero.

I think you can tell that I thought the film worked quite well, as it takes that basic big idea and goes at it in a fairly realistic way. To be fair, the comic also made similar points, but the comic had some rather unpalatable stuff in it too, which this removes or changes.

Where it did loose me a bit was towards the end, where it kinda tried to realise a comic book fantasy, but by doing so got a bit too far away from that realistic tinge. But apart from that, I really enjoyed it - it looked great and sounded fantastic (but then there were 4 composers!) and had plenty of blackly comic stuff in it.

Something I did quite like was that you could probably enjoy this if you had only a cursory knowledge of comic books, but if you really know comics, there was a lot of extra stuff to enjoy. This also worked at multiple levels, with some more obvious nods, but also a structure that reflects some classic themes of comic books characters.

As this was a Blu-Ray, I guess I should also note that there were plenty of extras - a full commentary and then a documentary that was roughly as long as the film itself, and a few other bits too.