“Show’s over motherfuckers,” Chloe Grace Moretz’s always-controversial Hit-Girl says in the most pivotal scene of the 2010 instant geek cult classic Kick-Ass. The gleefully shocking expletive follows a scene of extravagant movie violence and high-tension editing as director Matthew Vaughn strobe lights his sharp visuals to the ridiculously operatic (and reappropriated) “Adagio In D Minor” by composer John Murphy. The sequence is meant to be hilarious, harrowing and awe-inspiring as an 11-year-old girl armed to the teeth with semi-automatic pistols desperately fights to save the life of her overacting father played by Nicolas Cage dressed like a Batman knock-off. While she may fail in her mission, this moment has lived on in the dubious superhero movie hall of fame.
There is so much that is offensive about this scene for the gatekeepers of good taste and purveyors of moral decency that I would not know where to begin. But it is clear that its greatest sin remains that it wasn’t the end of the show. Hell, we hadn’t even gotten to the sequel where a character would quite literally adopt the (jarred) five-dollar handle of “The Motherfucker.”
For the last month or so Kick-Ass 2’s incoming release, hurled at this weekend like a throwing star, has been engulfed by a cloud of moral disdain for its mere existence. Ultimately, this has done little to improve the sequel’s box office returns, which have been overtaken by the definitively Oprah’s Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Still, the cultural climate should be noteworthy considering how euphorically welcomed the series was in 2010, and how total its disavowal and societal regret is in 2013. Especially as the most peculiar aspect about this kind of media frenzy is that the charge was first sounded by one of its stars.
Jim Carrey, an enigmatic face of Hollywood for the last 20 years, is in the midst of rebranding his image following one senseless tragedy after another in the American heartland. In the wake of one of the most horrifying school shootings ever, committed last December when a lone gunman walked into an elementary school named Sandy Hook, many minds and emotions were fundamentally and understandably changed. In Carrey’s case, it began with a provocative, if curiously targeted, condemnation of the political maneuvering of gun lobbyist the National Rifle Association and its long dead movie star president, Charlton Heston. However, the entertaining satire simultaneously raised many eyebrows, as Carrey was also appearing in trailers for this summer’s Kick-Ass 2, in which he could be seen waving a gun around with a big grin.
In the final film, it turns out the gun was empty; yet, Carrey’s political reservations about gun violence were not. In June, the funnyman movie star distanced himself from the film’s violence and his role in it. This came as an even bigger surprise, considering that he was such a fan of the original film that he appeared alongside Conan O’Brien in 2010 dressed as Kick-Ass and openly campaigned for a role in the sequel. While the change of heart appears legitimate, it remains a curiosity why he announced the move via Twitter to his bosses who reportedly gave him a 7-figure paycheck for his work. Still, the gates were opened and the hype around the August follow-up exploded like a discharging bullet.
Now, finally released, the claws have come out, and many critics are issuing a moral outcry to a film whose predecessor was greeted with 78 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. It has been called “mean-spirited,” “ugly” and just all around repugnant. But the most biting denouncement has been reserved by Manohla Dargis, co-chief film critic of The New York Times. In her scathingly riveting takedown of the film, entitled by copy as “Teenagers with Guns, Supposedly Good Guys,” Dargis accuses the film not only of glorifying over-the-top violence, but panegyrizing teenage violence itself.
“You may also wonder who at Universal signed off on a flick in which human beings are as disposable as tissues, and teenagers shoot to kill,” rhetorically muses the writer with more than a hint of pessimism about the Hollywood system. She goes on to exasperatedly sigh at the sequel and its progenitor for using caricatures and extremes to justify manic violence masquerading as woozy comedy. And at the heart of it all is, as always, Moretz’s now 15-year-old Mindy Macready, aka Hit-Girl.
“Now Mindy is just another kid with only one real friend, no real parenting, problems at school, a carefully nurtured secret life and a roomful of lethal weapons,” Dargis cryptically closes her review with. “In other words, while she’s still a fictional character and a moderately cartoonish one at that, she’s also a heroic stand-in for every teenager who picks up a gun and starts shooting.”
Moral disdain and sweeping cultural implications in a nutshell.
Personally, I did not find Kick-Ass 2 to be a good movie. Despite a number of entertaining set-pieces and laugh-out-loud one-liners fired off from writer/director Jeff Wadlow’s screenplay like a particularly crude night at The Comedy Cellar, the picture undeniably lacks the creative spark that elevated Matthew Vaughn’s 2010 original flick from a coarse groaner to a spiteful love letter for the superhero form that sported a wickedly devious smile. Kick-Ass is an infinitely smart action/comedy/drama/schizophrenic fantasy that revels in its lowbrow humor and silly medium; Kick-Ass 2 is, at best, equivalent to one of the lesser Judd Apatow-produced raunchfests that settles for the juvenile yuks. It often achieves just that thanks to a very talented cast that, if nothing else, further cements Ms. Moretz’s inevitable rise to Hollywood stardom, but the joy and wonder of the original left with Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman.
Nonetheless, I cannot help but detest these media violence arguments, whether splashed across social media by a mega-name or left dangling between the lines of a well-written analysis. Either way, it is maddening.
The moral majority could also be heard, much more faintly, when the previous Kick-Ass enjoyed its time in the sun. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert infamously blasted the well-received curveball as “morally reprehensible” and included it on his “Your Movie Sucks” list. While I disagree with Ebert on that particular film, he remains one of the most insightful and illuminating cinephiles to ever put pen to paper. In that vein, Ebert coined a terrific phrase, which he often repeated: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” Truthfully, reaction to the level of carnage in Kick-Ass, which can be comparable to the animated wackiness of Looney Tunes, is contextually not dissimilar to distressing over Elmer Fudd shooting Daffy Duck in the face. And given that Universal Pictures evidently toned down the mayhem for this big studio supported sequel, the sudden influx of Ebert cosigners is even more mystifying. Is an 11-year-old committing violence really more acceptable than a 15-year-old?
To be fair, for some the cutoff age may be 17. After all, Quentin Tarantino featured a murderous 17-year-old waif, who appeared at all times in a Japanese schoolgirl outfit no less, in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003). Gogo Yubari, a sociopathic teenager played by Chiaki Kuriyama, amusingly slaughters male suitors at bars and wields a nasty looking mace-like ball of death before being brutally (and graphically) dispatched herself by our heroic Uma Thurman. Kuriyama likely even got the role for playing Chigusa in another cult classic called Battle Royale (2000), a film in which she plays a 15-year-old who castrates a classmate who cut her face (that film is often cited by critics as a forerunner to The Hunger Games).
All this exaggerated and celebratory violence, and the film received nothing but the highest of praises, including from Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis, the latter of whom was then writing for the Los Angeles Times. Dargis at the time, under the headline “It’s Bloody Tarantino,” called Kill Bill“a blood soaked valentine to movies.” She even enthusiastically begins the review by stating that “blood doesn’t just flow in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill-Vol. 1’– it splatters and spurts and rises in fountains so baroque and luxuriant that there are moments when it seems as if it were raining red.”
God forbid that I try to draw a parallel between Tarantino and Wadlow, but their approach to violence in comedic terms is not that different, save for that Tarantino does it with grace, artistry and deft, as opposed to clumsily stumbling over his own material. Yet, even with filmmakers whose use of violence I despise, such as frequent Tarantino collaborator Eli Roth’s abhorrent Hostel films, or more recently Michael Bay’s brain dead monument to materialism, Pain & Gain, accreditation or implication for the ruination of culture seems not only to be folly, but the exact sort of corn syrup-drenched paper mask that the stalwarts of a deadly status-quo yearn to hide behind.
Last year, Tarantino released another film that was rated R for extreme violence, which includes (but was not limited to) a man being ripped apart by dogs, another man being beaten to death for sport, a woman being sold into a slaver’s form of prostitution and an African-American hero who goes on a triumphant rampage through the white planter class of a Mississippian Antebellum plantation.
Also, it’s a fantastic film that deserved its Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, as did featured co-star Christoph Waltz, who picked up his second Academy Award from a Tarantino collaboration. The New York Times even dubiously claimed it to be one of the year’s films influenced by Obama’s cultural impact. While that argument can certainly be made for other 2012 prestige pictures, including Lincoln, I would call shenanigans on this particular correlation. Still, it also drew the ire of other political forces last winter.
Following the inconceivably heinous events in Newtown, the NRA was disturbingly slow to respond to the madness, though still lightning quick to find a scapegoat in their eventual press conference. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, wasted no time in changing the subject from actual gun violence to media violence. And while the handpicked sacrificial lambs were laughably dated, American Psycho (2000) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the message is really a timeless classic. Soon enough, actually culturally relevant Django Unchained ended up in the breathlessly irrelevant conversation.
In January, instead of discussing his movie, Tarantino was rather skeptically asked by NPR to essentially defend the entire worth of movies featuring violence.
“I'm really annoyed,” the director said about the line of questioning. “I think it's disrespectful. I think it's disrespectful to [the victims’] memory ... of the people who died to talk about movies.” He posited to the elephant in the room: Why is this a discussion instead of gun control or mental health?
The answer is because it is easier to talk about anything other than the nose in front of your face. Consider that in 1999, following the Columbine school shooting, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that his organization thought “it’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show.” Anything except THAT unreasonable bill being pushed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) in the U.S. Senate right now! Of course, when the House shot down the Senate bill later that year, the NRA surely did not campaign for background checks at gun shows. Why, they even vowed to oppose universal background checks in 2013 after a 24-month period saw mass shootings in Tucson, Aurora and Newtown, among others. Hence, the successful lobbying effort killing the anemic 2013 Senate bill to require universal background checks, a basic reform that according to polls enjoyed the support of a whopping 86 percent of Americans.
But let’s get back to violence in Kick-Ass 2, as it is the much more crucial problem facing this society.
I would not be so authoritative (or naïve) to deny the concept of media influence. While supposedly once conclusive research, such as Dr. Albert Bandura’s famed Bobo doll experiment, has been repeatedly torn apart for selective bias and other inadequate temporal jumps, one cannot ignore that human nature includes some form of observational learning. It is one of the many factors as to how one generation passes knowledge to the next. But the idea that media, art or fiction, even that of bad quality, should be feared or condemned as a causal effect or spectral signpost for the demented or mentally ill in our society is smoke in the wind, chased since Romeo and Juliet was blamed for teen suicide, Batman and Robin for "turning" children gay, and Catcher in the Rye was banned in U.S. schools for causing youthful revolt and inciting Mark David Chapman to shoot John Lennon.
In other words, it’s like suggesting that teenagers didn’t know what sex was until Elvis Presley shook his hips, or that Al Capone didn’t discover his Lake Shore hospitality until he watched Howard Hughes’ Scarface. There will always be that old guard attempting to shame with a shaking finger the Hughes’ or the Presleys or the Salingers of the world, always ready to bemoan the assured decadence and decay of a society slipping into the moral abyss with each passing year and new popular trend. But try to discuss fixing that societal decay? Oh hold on, someone wants to get back to talking about the movies.
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WELL-DONE! Politically charged, yes, but those are my politics, too! You nailed it. I am tired of people having the WRONG arguments about these issues. "it’s like suggesting that teenagers didn’t know what sex was until Elvis Presley shook his hips" ....BOOM!