I know, I know. You’re all thinking I’m about to lay into the liberal splashes of claret resulting from Hit Girl’s slashfests as an example of the decay of cinema’s moral fiber.

Well, you’re wrong. I don’t need to lay down any Roger Ebert-style preaching to pull the rug from under this colossal waste of time that has inexplicably grossed over $46 million and counting domestically. Kick-Ass, in my view, is the most overrated film of the last decade. Rather than just embark on a mindless, meandering rant, I will attempt to disprove some of the utter, utter drivel spouted in praise of this celluloid cockrot by using the critics’ words against them.

“…enough biting wit and bone crunching action to justify the title.” Dan Lybarger, eFilmCritic

OK, Dan, name me a single witty line in the entire movie. Go on. A single original one-liner. Something Billy Wilder or Mel Brooks would be proud of.

Hmm? Nothing comes to mind? How’s about I help you out with some stand-out howlers:

“Okay you cunts… Let’s see what you can do now!”; “Fuck this shit, I’m getting the bazooka!”; “Mindy, no more homework, babydoll. Time for Frank D’Amico to go bye-bye.”

You get the idea. I cannot recall, even with a re-watching and a trawling of IMDB, a single goddamn laugh-worthy line in the ENTIRE MOVIE. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but unless you’re Buster Keaton, a film tipped as a “comedy” should have amusing dialogue, no? Or am I too wedded to the past, when comedians actually had to make people laugh in order to be considered funny? So, in that case, I can only assume the film was replete with sidesplitting PHYSICAL comedy. That must be the aforementioned “bone crunching action.”

Flesh-piercing would be more like it. Aside from the lead getting hit unexpectedly by a car (and by “unexpectedly” I mean “utterly predictably”) after his tussle with street hoodlums, most of the action in Kick-Ass revolved around sharpened pieces of metal being pushed in, or up, human beings. Hurr hurr.

Which brings me to my second point: being stabbed by muggers, however you dress it up, is NOT FUNNY. I will grant that Dave Lizewski’s ill-fated attempt to foil two car thieves had comic potential, but his being beaten up and stabbed before being left for dead was not only in poor taste, the stabbing added NOTHING to the intended focus of the scene—namely, our “hero’s” ineffectual attempts at heroism. Even a giant neon sign blaring “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH AT THIS” every three seconds across the screen would have left me confused as to whether the filmmakers actually thought this was even a remotely amusing situation. If Lizewski had been dressed in a bunny suit, this would still have been a horrific attack on a largely defenseless teenager. Ditto all subsequent “action” scenes involving the lead character.

And don’t try and argue that these were “serious moments.” The scene was shot and played as if what was occurring was funny. Even superhero movies with pretensions to comic moments don’t attempt to get cheap laughs out of the kind of violence that 90% of people are actually afraid might happen to them on their way home. This is why Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man et al. are quick to show the terror felt when someone’s alone and defenseless in a dark alleyway. Even Joel Schumacher doesn’t trivialize the horror of Bruce Wayne witnessing his parents being gunned down in front of him by an opportunistic thief, and he made Batman and Robin. In Kick-Ass, little Brucie would probably have been forced to witness their rape and beheading to the tune of Benny Hill’s “Yakkety Sax.”

As for the “hilarious” moment where Mark Strong kicks the living hell out of a Kick-Ass impersonator in a case of mistaken identity—this again might have been funny had he discovered his error PRIOR to shooting the innocent person repeatedly in the head. But no, the mistake is only revealed in the following scene, where we discover the bodybag contains the corpse of a popular children’s entertainer. In terms of situation comedy, this scene surely ranks alongside the opening scene of American History X. I’m only relieved the guy wasn’t viciously beaten and shot to death in front of the screaming toddlers at the kiddies’ party to which he’d been en route.

Here’s another common notion that is three types of misguided.

“Moretz ultimately stands as the film’s most valuable asset” - David Nusair, Reel Film

Too right. A foul-mouthed mass-murdering child. Box-office gold. This is the level the film finally has to punch at in order to wring laughs from its soggy screenplay. I have no doubt that Ms. Moretz is a talented actress, and would not be so gauche as to suggest she doesn’t give the role her all. My issue is that, considering how inherently awesome the notion of a father-daughter crimefighting duo seems on paper, the fact that the screenplay’s relationship between the two is at best abusive and at worst borderline incestuous drains the character of all weight. Moretz is not playing a strong-willed, aggressive child “doing it for daddy.” She’s a little girl systematically abused from birth, whose infinitely better father figure of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-him-token-black-guy Omari Hardwick is sidelined by Nicolas Cage’s utterly selfish and completely charmless mustachioed ex-cop. The reason Moretz is a “valuable asset,” is that the shock value inherent in Hit Girl means that, essentially, it doesn’t matter what she says or does, so long as it’s offensive. Bingo—zero input, massive output. In terms of a well-crafted role, Hit Girl has less dimensions than Roobarb and Custard, and none of the childish twinkle. In fact, by the end of the movie, I’d have been happy to see her shot in the face. Not a sentiment I often have about eleven-year-old girls.

“The best comic book screen adaptation since The Dark Knight!” – Kam Williams, theloop21.com

Fuck you, Kam.

Here’s a condensed selection of why the other platitudes I’ve overheard to describe this film are totally, totally wrong.

“There’s a great quirky love story.”
Oh—the “she only loves him because she thinks he’s gay then fucks him when she finds he’s not” classic? Original as a Chinese Bentley and about half as appealing, the love story that flicks in and out of the narrative is so unwanted that it feels like the entire sub-plot only made the cut because nobody noticed it was there as they were too busy ogling the girl’s norks. It’s such a pathetic attempt at substance that the filmmakers don’t even bother to return to it after a while. The only reason Katie is present at all is to be the only person in Dave Lizewski’s life who’s enough of a nonentity to care about what happens to him.

“The lead is a great geeky antihero.”
Absolutely not. He’s a handsome, voluptuous American jock with a Keanu Reeves torso and what comedienne Pam Ann might describe as “cold cock-sucking lips” who has been put in a daft wig and specs to make him look like be belongs in the comic book store his infinitely better-cast friends spend their time instead of receiving hand jobs from a cheerleaders. At least Tobey Maguire looks like an underdog.

“It’s great to see Nicolas Cage playing against type.”
He’s not playing against type—he has played a badly-drawn father figure in almost every movie he’s made since The Rock. And, in Kick-Ass, he does what he’s paid to do as Nic Cage—deliver his lines in a Nic Cage way. Honestly, these days I’m wondering if he’s done some kind of Face/Off identity switch with a non-English speaking immigrant who does his scenes while the real Nic trims his Bath mansion’s rose bushes in a sombrero. Not that it matters in a role so poorly fleshed-out as Damon Macready—they pretty much took Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd and made him slightly less approachable.

“The soundtrack is ace!”
No, it’s the mix tape Quentin Tarantino lost under his car seat and didn’t enjoy enough to bother fishing out. The tracks range from American Pie reject teen anthems to Ennio Morricone’s back catalog, all deployed as if it were Quentin himself in the editing booth, but with his heart elsewhere. OK, there’s some good music in this film. None of it belongs where it’s placed. All the makers did was pay the copyright. That is not crafting a movie soundtrack—that’s buying the copyright for every track that results in people going, “Oh, I love this song” when it comes on in a nightclub. Basically, the film was scored on iTunes. In one afternoon. Between wanks.

“Christopher Mintz-Plasse is hilarious!”
Christopher Mintz-Plasse is Fogel from Superbad. He trades on the fact that he is Fogel from Superbad. He has no other acting skills than those which would be required of Fogel from Superbad. He’s essentially building a career out of appearing slightly retarded. Try and find an expression he pulls in Kick-Ass that we didn’t see already in Superbad. The downside of this casting choice is when his character is called on to be afraid for his life as Hit Girl mows down untold numbers of his father’s goons in a variety of gory ways, he simply gives us more of his Fogel-flipping-out-in-case-his-ID-gets-rejected-at-the-liquor-store. Christopher Mintz-Plasse has a squeaky voice, an awkward physique and a speech impediment that requires him to gurn when he speaks. He can do loud, or quiet. This is the extent of his range as an actor. What you’re laughing at is someone who looks and sounds disabled.

For those who still think that I’m just a stick-in-the-mud who can’t take a bit of tongue-in-cheek filmmaking, let me state that I don’t object to ultraviolence, bad language or dubious sexual ethics. I’m a huge fan of South Park. The difference is that South Park places its broader social or cultural messages behind violence; bad language and fart jokes to add weight to its agenda. Kick-Ass, from what I can gather, has no agenda. What is its moral? What is it spoofing? Who are they poking fun at?

My main objection is to cynical, manufactured cinema. And, in that ever-growing pantheon, we’ve got a new supervillain. Kick-Ass is not a film made by people who love cinema. Hell, it’s not even a film made by people who hate cinema. It’s a film made by people who couldn’t give a shit as long as cinema’s making money. In other words, the Uwe Boll school, the Disaster Movie school. To make a good film, you have to be responsible to the conventions of cinema—narrative, character, execution—the entire enterprise has to be a labor of love. You take responsibility for entertaining and illuminating your audience. This is the Family Guy approach to filmmaking—”Let’s string together some situations that might be funny, but not bother to flesh them into no-holds-barred quickfire satire with a tightly-structured narrative as that requires effort, and to be honest, we’re more going for the Meet the Spartans generation.” Films such as Kick-Ass lack the power of satires and comedies past—the power to profoundly influence, rather than merely attempt to reflect, popular culture.

But, as Dave Lizewski says, “With no power, comes no responsibility.”