Kate Solomon

SPOILER ALERT – I can’t seem to help myself on the spoiler front at the moment. So if you haven’t seen Kick-Ass yet, then you might want to steer clear.

There’s taking films seriously, and then there’s taking films too seriously.

You can’t have missed the buzz around Kick-Ass. It tells the story of normal, cliché-less teenager Dave. He gets a bee in his bonnet about fighting crime and decides to take on the criminals of New York, armed with nothing more than a wetsuit and a couple of batons, to varying degrees of success.

Along the way he meets eleven-year-old Hit Girl (aka Mindy) and her father Big Daddy, vigilante crime fighters with real skills and a more varied arsenal than lowly Kick-Ass. Shenanigans with bad guys ensue. There’s violence, there’s gore, there’s swearing, and there are most definitely laughs.

So it’s really a shame that Roger Ebert couldn’t see past the caricatured violence in his one-star review.

He credits the audience with very little intelligence if he thinks we’re going to take the whole film literally. I think we can all agree that we get plenty of real life from real life so when we pay the best part of £10 to go to the cinema, the last thing we want is the tedium of our own lives shining back on us. Ebert appears to have forgotten when he wrote his review – we know it’s not real! We’re suspending our disbelief, it’s not like we’re about to go out and live our lives according to the word of Kick-Ass.

Ebert argues that Kick-Ass’s high rating (15 in the UK) is going to make six-year-olds want to see the film. Six-year-olds, well known for the ease with which they can pass for 15, will obviously take to the streets with bazookas after seeing the film, and then who’ll be laughing? Honestly, you might as well condemn Oliver Twist for showing young boys picking pockets.

I’m prepared to accept that some children are influenced by violent movies to commit violent acts. But countless more children do not take movies in that way. And savvy little Mindy isn’t gunning down innocent passers-by but dishing out justice – just like a million movie characters before her. Bad guys drop like flies in thousands of films and TV shows, and big budget action epics of the same rating as Kick-Ass do away with good and bad minor characters by the truckload. I don’t see why one fictional young girl should be required to feel remorse when we readily accept that hundreds of fictional adults don’t.

He does raise some points I agreed with to a certain extent – I did feel a soupçon of concern when the generally non-violent title character gunned down a room full of people and thought little of it. Similarly, Mindy probably should have been more emotionally affected by certain events in the film.

Ebert places the blame for Mindy’s emotional detachment on her upbringing – her father, he complains, never sits her down to talk about death and the fact that what they are doing isn’t a game. But surely that’s the point; she’s been raised as a crime-fighting ninja. She knows it isn’t a game because it’s her life.

If Ebert is going to be outraged that Hit Girl is a product of her upbringing, then he should take more issue with Chris aka Red Mist – a nice but lonely boy who is desperate to follow in his drug-baron father’s footsteps. That’s apparently acceptable. By the time the film ends, Chris is set to become a super-villain in order to avenge his father’s death. But it was this semi-baddie who expressed the most grief over the myriad deaths, so I guess that made him ok. Oh, and the fact that he’s a boy, of course.

It’s funny, because the things I liked about Kick-Ass – riffing on violence, pastiched pop culture references, potty mouths and obvious jokes – are the very things I tend to dislike about Tarantino films.

Tarantino, the film critics’ darling, seems engaged in a serious love affair with violence – and not just a spot of fisticuffs here and there. It’s always full-on, wince-inducing, blood-spattered, resulting-in-death-if-the-character’s-lucky violence. While Tarantino dabbles in a rather more high-brow kind of film making, why shouldn’t his output be judged by the same standards as any other filmmaker? After all, there’s really no situation in life where the kind of violence portrayed in both Kick-Ass and Tarantino films is acceptable.

I’ve taken a lot of words to come down to basically this: some people want to take every film super seriously. Fine; as you can see, I can do that too. But Kick-Ass – which I actually applaud for having such a strong female character, no matter her age – doesn’t deserve outrage and is certainly a film worthy of more than one star.

Save those one-star reviews for the really bad movies; the identikit Hollywood fare, the films that are shoddily made despite enormous budgets, shedloads of CGI, tacked on 3D and supersonic star power. They’re the real one-starrers and, in the long run, they’ll do far more damage to the kids than Kick-Ass ever will.