Todd’s Movie Blog

An eye catching post title, huh?  It comes from Roger Ebert’s review of Kick Ass.  He finds the movie morally reprehensible (which interestingly enough he also said about every Friday the 13th movies) due to having an 11-year-old girl beating up and killing bad guys, and then getting beaten up herself (I wonder if he will feel the same way about a 77-year-old Michael Caine gunning down drug pushers in Harry Brown?).

Now he states that he understands that the film is a satire, but doesn’t get what the film is satirizing, probably because he can’t get past the undoubtably horrible images of a child being beaten.  To be fair I haven’t seen the movie myself yet (tax day having been this week), so I can’t give a fair assessment on what Ebert saw.

However I have read the synopsis and what I get from it is that the morally reprehensible image of a child giving and receiving pain, is showing just how messed up the image of Batman and Robin would be in real life, remember that originally in the comics Robin was about ten to twelve years old.  And the movie really plays up the Batman connection, Nicholas Cage’s costume, he speaks in an Adam West style of voice, and one ad actually has the villain say they need to take out the guy who dresses like Batman.

So maybe there is an actual valid point behind the character of Hit Girl, and the film makers are really critiquing superheroes.  Or maybe it’s just a way to stir up controversy to boost ticket sales, I know one person at work was horrified when she learned about all of the swearing Hit Girl does throughout the film.  Hard to say which is the truth, might even be both.  Satire is such a difficult thing to really interpret and understand sometimes.  Perhaps I will have a better grasp of what the film makers were trying to do after I have seen the film.