A non-spoilery rant about "Kick Ass"

[sqbr]

So, on the whole, Kick Ass was exactly my sort of film. It's both a straightforward geek-becomes-superhero wish fulfillment and a subversion of it, and the violence was glorious (I quite like violence done right). I agree with those saying that the violence and swearing really aren't worth complaining about, and aren't even extra specially celebrated compared to many other films (the violence looks like it hurts, for good guys and bad). But.

I kept hearing it was good in an over the top puerile sort of way, and was ok with that, but just before watching it found out it was based on a comic by Mark Millar. As it started I was reminded of this, and of how I felt about Wanted.

I liked this a LOT more than Wanted but it had a lot of the same issues, just not as much. The whole point of Kick Ass is to take the tropes of the geek-as-superhero fantasy and take them to an intense extreme. A similar approach to comics as Frank Miller, but a younger less macho sort of manly. Which is lots of fun and also point out how absurd some of those tropes are..but it also replicates a lot of the tropes fairly uncritically. The most blatant to my mind is the "Black men are scary bad guys and maybe cops" trope. This was not challenged in the slightest, nor was it satirised in any way. It was just there.

The one that pisses me off though, possibly because I am not black but I am a girl (I bet black female comic book nerds love this movie), was the portrayal of women, especially the relationship between girls and comic book geeks. The only female characters who get more than maybe 2 lines are an 11 year old girl who has pretty much no motivations beyond making her father happy, and two teenage girls who exist entirely to be love interests, and male geek fantasies. Do they love comic books? No. They go "Oh, I've never tried superhero comics, but now you've shown them to me, they're actually pretty cool." And the main love interest says something like "I hadn't read comics much before, but I've been recommended some. You know, Shouju Beat and Scott Pilgrim, stuff like that." And maybe I'm taking it too much to heart but it felt like a total replication of trope of comic fangirls as only liking comics because their boyfriends got them into them, and all they like is "that girly stuff". Bah. (I mean, I do like Scott Pilgrim. That's not the point :P) The love interest was obviously intended in part as a satire of the absurdly nice wish fulfillment love interest, but the way it was done was still irritating.

Anyway, I could say more, but I wanted to get that off my chest.

Cam said "But male comic book nerds got stereotyped too" and yes, they did, but one of them also got to become a superhero. He never entirely stopped being a loser, which was one of the things I loved about the movie, but still. This was definitely a male geek fantasy.

Comments

[whatistigerbalm]

A similar approach to comics as Frank Miller, but a younger less macho sort of manly.

I LOLOLed at this, because it's the best slapdown of Mark Millar I've read in a long while. I <3 you.

[sqbr]

But I think "Like Frank Miller but younger and less macho" is a compliment! Of course, Mark Millar might not :)

[aris_tgd]

From everything my comics geek friends say, Mark Millar has... racial skeeviness issues. Which are way more pronounced in the comics. They apparently whitewash the movies to make them LESS RACIST. *shudder*

And yeah, I don't think I'm going to go see this movie--after seeing the trailers, I think I am just going to enjoy those and move on. I AM looking forward to the Scott Pilgrim movie. That looks awesome.

[sqbr]

Yeah, in this movie the hero beat up thugs who "happened" to be mostly black. In the comic "Wanted" the fact that the thugs he beat up weren't white was explicitly part of the appeal.

It's definitely not for everyone. And yes, the Scott Pilgrim movie looks way cooler than I was expecting when I heard they were making it. I must get around to reading the rest of the comics, all they had in the library was like book 2.

[polyserena]

SPOILER ALERT FOR THIS COMMENT




I really liked Mindy myself because she didn't fall apart when her father died, she just kept going. Which made her stand apart as a character with her own motivations and personality outside of just being a daughter. Okay, her motivation was to finish what her father started and avenge his death but that's a perfectly normal motivation for action heroes I think.

But oh wow I did not like the main character at all, mostly because it seemed like as an audience I was meant to be a nerdy guy sympathising with him and I'm not, and I saw him as an arsehole. I think deceiving someone who thinks you're incapable of being attracted to them and then touching them and sleeping next to them is fairly reprehensible. Which made it so disappointing when said girl didn't spend longer than 30 seconds being angry at him for it. Apparently he doesn't get the girl in the comics, and I keep wondering why they changed that. Can they really not make a movie anymore without throwing in something like that?

[sqbr]

Yeah, I oversimplified: I do actually really like Mindy as a character. And I think an eleven year old is allowed to be very much in their parents shadow. But when you look at all the female characters as a group, she's the closest to any of them of having her own motivations and interests, and they're still very much a reflection of who her father made her.

And oh yes, that whole thing with the pretending to be gay was creeeepy. He was such a Nice Guy, when he said "I don't deserve you" or whatever I was thinking "No! You don't!"

[polyserena]

That's very true! I was just so happy to see a character like her that it didn't occur to me what a very low standard that is for being happy with... okay, I'm not happy with the portrayal of female characters in that film but happier than I could have been because she was in there. Pretend that sentence makes sense.

I would even have been okay with them getting together in the end if she just stayed angry at him for a reasonable amount of time and made it very clear how NOT COOL what he did was.

[sqbr]

Makes sense to me!

And yeah, the speed is what made it really skeevy. Way to utterly dismiss the issues, film.