2 weeks ago the SDCC gave us hundreds of pictures of cosplayers to laugh at. It also gave us more reason to grumble under our breath at Twilight fans, and curious thoughts as to what those 7,000 people in the Avatar screening room were allowed to see. But today I won’t be talking about any of those things. No, today the footage for Kick-Ass was leaked.
What is Kick-Ass? It’s Matthew Vaughn’s (Stardust, Layer Cake) adaptation of Mark Millar’s (Wanted, The Ultimates) comic series. Like Wanted, Kick-Ass was adapted into a movie before the series was even finished written, but this time it looks to be turning out much better.
In Kick-Ass we see a high school comic nerd wondering why nobody’s ever tried to be a super hero. So with a makeshift costume of a ski-mask and a snowboarding outfit, armed with a couple policeman’s batons, he decides to fight crime. At least he tries. What actually happens is what you’d expect in the real world: the lanky kid is beaten within an edge of his life, stabbed, and hit by a car.
The reason this movie is important is because the super-hero genre is getting into an awkward little corner, aesthetically: X-Men avoided the spandex altogether, going for more of a uniform than a costume. This actually worked so well that since then the X-Men comics have adopted that look, at least for awhile. The Spider-Man movies didn’t really have the luxury of that choice because, well, with Spider-Man it’s such a big part of the character that to do away with it would be to do away with Peter Parker’s flashy ego. The problem, though, is they gave him this expensive, chrome, carbon-fiber looking getup. I always wondered how this high school kid found the thousands of dollars to put together this suit. Superman Returns did the same thing, they did away with the spandex Christopher Reeves wore, and gave him this high tech machine-stitched…thing. Watchmen went one step further and actually redesigned everyone so they looked badass instead of human.
Anyway, back to Kick-Ass. The reason this movie is important is because the superhero as a film genre is taking itself too seriously. Kickass is about a bunch of kids making their costumes out of everyday items and basically getting massacred. McLovin from Superbad drives around smoking a joint using his superhero status to get laid.
The aesthetic these costumes present is interesting, because you can’t help but laugh at them. The problem with Watchmen was you were supposed to feel sorry for Dan Dreiberg as he coped with impotence and failure, but in the movie it was impossible, because you could only see him as a badass, flying through the air and breaking people’s arms.
Watch the footage and you’ll see what kind of movie Kick-Ass is trying to be. I’m hoping this aesthetic will catch on more in movies, because there’s plenty of stories from the 70+ years of comics that would work perfectly for film, just as long as a certain aesthetic is observed as they make it.
For example right now would be a perfect time to make a Power Man and Iron Fist movie, at the height of the “Bromance” genre, about a large black man from a New York ghetto hanging out with his best friend, a thin, rich white man dressed in green spandex wearing yellow spandex flats. Maybe Judd Apatow could make it.
