NoArrow
Joined Aug 2002
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Reviews261
NoArrow's rating
I can see how "Kick-Ass" is gonna be popular...but, then, I can see how "Transformers 2" could be popular, too. Now that that's out of the way...
If you're someone who thinks it might be a lark to watch an 11-year-old corner a defenceless woman and stab her twice through the chest, this movie might be for you. There's also a scene where she puts a guy in a trash compactor and we watch for a couple minutes as he's squished to death. The guy wasn't a character before this scene (and I don't remember what relevance he has to the movie), so we're not watching the payoff to a joke, we're just watching...a guy getting squished by a trash compactor. The brutality of the scene is immediately undercut with the 11-year-old employing some nasty profanity, an easy joke that'll get an immediate reaction, doing away with the conflict I imagine (hope?) a lot of the audience will be feeling after the scene that preceded it.
The premise is: real people trying to be super-heroes (not a bad idea - I liked it in "The Dark Knight"). Dave is a comic book geek modelled, I assume, on most of the movie's target audience. He actually bears a closer resemblance to a Michael Cera hero, but, I'll get to that later. Anyway, he likes comic books, he decides to start "fighting crime" (which is always just around the corner in these movies) so he orders a suit and goes at it. He's not very good, and his friends make fun of him for the idea.
Meanwhile, an ex-cop (Nicolas Cage - very good) is turning his young daughter (the 11-year-old) into a cold-blooded killer, for our benefit. They're playing out a revenge scheme against the movie's chief villain, a mob boss played by Mark Strong. The plot in this movie sometimes feels like math: setup + action = payoff. Actually, that's exactly what it feels like. It's supposed satire is constantly undercut by its rigid obedience to its own formula. Since we can already guess, roughly, how everything will play out, I don't know why "Kick-Ass" spends so much time explaining itself.
When you hear the premise - real people trying to be superheroes - it sounds good, but watching this movie makes you think there are really only a few ways to handle it. There's "The Dark Knight" or "Iron Man" way, which is, more or less, taking it seriously. Or you could go for a satirical/darkly comic tone, which this movie tries for. If you were to do that, the best way to handle the violence would be to make it convincing, wouldn't it? Since, as the movie opens, it seems to make itself very clear that it doesn't take place in some phony superhero world? Instead, people get shot, they fall dead and CGI blood squirts out. You've seen one guy squirt CGI blood, you've seen 'em all - and it happens over and over again. The violence in this movie packs no punch, it's thoughtless and, supposedly, fun!, which makes it all the more disheartening when it's directed at the defenceless woman.
So it wasn't a very pleasant experience for me. Shift it an inch one way and you could've had a nice dark comedy (something by the Coens). An inch the other way you could've had a clever action movie (Crank & Crank 2). "Kick-Ass" is like a cautious kid, skirting the deep end without having the nerve to stick his toes in the water. It's not ballsy enough to take the father/daughter relationship to the logical, risky conclusion that it demands. It's not smart enough to question the motives of its boring protagonist - he's, basically, good (and he gets the girl). It's not original enough to offer us any "evil" that's not the cartoon kind we've already been tired of seeing in thousands of others movies. It's sense of humour is on the level of a disturbed child who likes to use swear words - which is one of its favourite jokes.
I said the movie's about real people trying to be superheroes. Not quite. It's about the "real people" you see in Hollywood movies, becoming superheroes. The "real people" played by Michael Cera or Shia LaBoef or Miley Cyrus. The ones who live in a glossy, safe world where they get what they want in the end. In this case, it's to have sex and kill a bunch of people. That could make for a great joke, except that, like those glossy Hollywood movies, it doesn't have the confidence to get you to actually think about it.
4/10 (Three points Nicolas Cage, one point Clark Duke. Otherwise, zilch.)
If you're someone who thinks it might be a lark to watch an 11-year-old corner a defenceless woman and stab her twice through the chest, this movie might be for you. There's also a scene where she puts a guy in a trash compactor and we watch for a couple minutes as he's squished to death. The guy wasn't a character before this scene (and I don't remember what relevance he has to the movie), so we're not watching the payoff to a joke, we're just watching...a guy getting squished by a trash compactor. The brutality of the scene is immediately undercut with the 11-year-old employing some nasty profanity, an easy joke that'll get an immediate reaction, doing away with the conflict I imagine (hope?) a lot of the audience will be feeling after the scene that preceded it.
The premise is: real people trying to be super-heroes (not a bad idea - I liked it in "The Dark Knight"). Dave is a comic book geek modelled, I assume, on most of the movie's target audience. He actually bears a closer resemblance to a Michael Cera hero, but, I'll get to that later. Anyway, he likes comic books, he decides to start "fighting crime" (which is always just around the corner in these movies) so he orders a suit and goes at it. He's not very good, and his friends make fun of him for the idea.
Meanwhile, an ex-cop (Nicolas Cage - very good) is turning his young daughter (the 11-year-old) into a cold-blooded killer, for our benefit. They're playing out a revenge scheme against the movie's chief villain, a mob boss played by Mark Strong. The plot in this movie sometimes feels like math: setup + action = payoff. Actually, that's exactly what it feels like. It's supposed satire is constantly undercut by its rigid obedience to its own formula. Since we can already guess, roughly, how everything will play out, I don't know why "Kick-Ass" spends so much time explaining itself.
When you hear the premise - real people trying to be superheroes - it sounds good, but watching this movie makes you think there are really only a few ways to handle it. There's "The Dark Knight" or "Iron Man" way, which is, more or less, taking it seriously. Or you could go for a satirical/darkly comic tone, which this movie tries for. If you were to do that, the best way to handle the violence would be to make it convincing, wouldn't it? Since, as the movie opens, it seems to make itself very clear that it doesn't take place in some phony superhero world? Instead, people get shot, they fall dead and CGI blood squirts out. You've seen one guy squirt CGI blood, you've seen 'em all - and it happens over and over again. The violence in this movie packs no punch, it's thoughtless and, supposedly, fun!, which makes it all the more disheartening when it's directed at the defenceless woman.
So it wasn't a very pleasant experience for me. Shift it an inch one way and you could've had a nice dark comedy (something by the Coens). An inch the other way you could've had a clever action movie (Crank & Crank 2). "Kick-Ass" is like a cautious kid, skirting the deep end without having the nerve to stick his toes in the water. It's not ballsy enough to take the father/daughter relationship to the logical, risky conclusion that it demands. It's not smart enough to question the motives of its boring protagonist - he's, basically, good (and he gets the girl). It's not original enough to offer us any "evil" that's not the cartoon kind we've already been tired of seeing in thousands of others movies. It's sense of humour is on the level of a disturbed child who likes to use swear words - which is one of its favourite jokes.
I said the movie's about real people trying to be superheroes. Not quite. It's about the "real people" you see in Hollywood movies, becoming superheroes. The "real people" played by Michael Cera or Shia LaBoef or Miley Cyrus. The ones who live in a glossy, safe world where they get what they want in the end. In this case, it's to have sex and kill a bunch of people. That could make for a great joke, except that, like those glossy Hollywood movies, it doesn't have the confidence to get you to actually think about it.
4/10 (Three points Nicolas Cage, one point Clark Duke. Otherwise, zilch.)
Thank God for the war in Iraq so that we can have movies as important as "The Messenger."
That's how it feels.
In the "The Messenger," Montgomery (Ben Foster) is returning home from the war only to be put on casualty notification work with Stone (Woody Harrelson). That's the setup. In the same way that Avatar's plot is the setup for special effects, The Messenger's is the setup for tears - tears bought, not earned. It promises to give us the real deal on grieving families and soldiers returning home, but in it's overwritten, overstylized way, it's really only about one thing: the audience member's susceptibility to shameless emotional manipulation.
Foster is a shell-shocked vet and Harrelson is a career soldier who's never seen action. Harrelson deals with his work through denial, Foster - the hero of the story - through a certain brand of, what I would call, "righteous nihilism." Foster had a girl he left home, played by Jena Malone, who shows up in the beginning for some nude scenes - shot from behind, with the nudity obscured just enough to keep this arty and tasteful. Malone and Foster have a conversation about marriage that turns out (in a clever gotchya! moment) to refer to Malone and her new fiancée, not Foster.
Foster was injured in the war. His left eye is dried out and he must give it constant eye-drops, providing a nice visual metaphor for a man who's been hardened and has to force himself to cry. Charlie Kaufman already used this image for laughs in "Synecdoche, NY," and I think he had the right idea. Foster apparently has another injury in his leg, but it doesn't seem to effect his walking and indeed it's rarely brought up.
The casualty notification scenes each come with their own gimmick. A dead soldier's pregnant girlfriend Foster and Harrelson have to awkwardly wait with while the soldier's mother comes home from the convenience store. A man who's surprised to find out his daughter didn't tell him she married the dead soldier before he left. A man who requires a translator. They accidentally run into a parent in a gas station, right before they were supposed to call on him, which in this movie is like the equivalent of a mad killer jumping out from the side of the screen in a horror movie.
They only have two standard runs that I recall, both with celebrities. The first is Steve Buscemi, as a father, who responds to news of his son's death by gazing tearfully off-screen and speechifying: "Look at that tree..." The second is Samantha Morton, as a widow. She handles it as politely as she can, and Morton handles the scene like a professional. A romance starts brewing between her and the Foster character. But it's forbidden, forbidden!
I knew I was in trouble about ten minutes into this dreck when Foster argues he can't do the work because he's not religious and Harrelson responds somberly, "You're not there for God. You're not there for heaven." Morton, later on, talks about finding her husband's shirt in the closet. This is what she says: "It smelled of rage and fear. It smelled of the man he had become." It's the kind of script that, if you had no taste, you'd think it deserved an Oscar nomination.
This mannered quality isn't only in the way it's written, but in the way it's shot. For the most part it's filmed with a stable, occasionally moving camera - except for the casualty notification scenes, which are straight-up hand-held shaky-cam. This is to communicate the...shakiness of the emotions, I guess. There's a long (and I mean long) conversation between Foster and Morton that's shot in one take, but it feels like the director was thinking, "I wanna try out one of those cool long take things like Mike Leigh does."
It's not all bad. The performances by Harrelson, Morton, Malone and Buscemi are effective (I'm still not sold on Foster, with his attitude, who comes off more like the lead singer of a really "dark" rock band than like a soldier who's seen action). The last half hour, when it leaves the casualty notification stuff behind and focuses on the main characters, works pretty well. There's a final monologue that illustrates what it's trying to illustrate without getting too poetic about it.
But by that point I was already too angry. I hated...most of this movie.
5/10
That's how it feels.
In the "The Messenger," Montgomery (Ben Foster) is returning home from the war only to be put on casualty notification work with Stone (Woody Harrelson). That's the setup. In the same way that Avatar's plot is the setup for special effects, The Messenger's is the setup for tears - tears bought, not earned. It promises to give us the real deal on grieving families and soldiers returning home, but in it's overwritten, overstylized way, it's really only about one thing: the audience member's susceptibility to shameless emotional manipulation.
Foster is a shell-shocked vet and Harrelson is a career soldier who's never seen action. Harrelson deals with his work through denial, Foster - the hero of the story - through a certain brand of, what I would call, "righteous nihilism." Foster had a girl he left home, played by Jena Malone, who shows up in the beginning for some nude scenes - shot from behind, with the nudity obscured just enough to keep this arty and tasteful. Malone and Foster have a conversation about marriage that turns out (in a clever gotchya! moment) to refer to Malone and her new fiancée, not Foster.
Foster was injured in the war. His left eye is dried out and he must give it constant eye-drops, providing a nice visual metaphor for a man who's been hardened and has to force himself to cry. Charlie Kaufman already used this image for laughs in "Synecdoche, NY," and I think he had the right idea. Foster apparently has another injury in his leg, but it doesn't seem to effect his walking and indeed it's rarely brought up.
The casualty notification scenes each come with their own gimmick. A dead soldier's pregnant girlfriend Foster and Harrelson have to awkwardly wait with while the soldier's mother comes home from the convenience store. A man who's surprised to find out his daughter didn't tell him she married the dead soldier before he left. A man who requires a translator. They accidentally run into a parent in a gas station, right before they were supposed to call on him, which in this movie is like the equivalent of a mad killer jumping out from the side of the screen in a horror movie.
They only have two standard runs that I recall, both with celebrities. The first is Steve Buscemi, as a father, who responds to news of his son's death by gazing tearfully off-screen and speechifying: "Look at that tree..." The second is Samantha Morton, as a widow. She handles it as politely as she can, and Morton handles the scene like a professional. A romance starts brewing between her and the Foster character. But it's forbidden, forbidden!
I knew I was in trouble about ten minutes into this dreck when Foster argues he can't do the work because he's not religious and Harrelson responds somberly, "You're not there for God. You're not there for heaven." Morton, later on, talks about finding her husband's shirt in the closet. This is what she says: "It smelled of rage and fear. It smelled of the man he had become." It's the kind of script that, if you had no taste, you'd think it deserved an Oscar nomination.
This mannered quality isn't only in the way it's written, but in the way it's shot. For the most part it's filmed with a stable, occasionally moving camera - except for the casualty notification scenes, which are straight-up hand-held shaky-cam. This is to communicate the...shakiness of the emotions, I guess. There's a long (and I mean long) conversation between Foster and Morton that's shot in one take, but it feels like the director was thinking, "I wanna try out one of those cool long take things like Mike Leigh does."
It's not all bad. The performances by Harrelson, Morton, Malone and Buscemi are effective (I'm still not sold on Foster, with his attitude, who comes off more like the lead singer of a really "dark" rock band than like a soldier who's seen action). The last half hour, when it leaves the casualty notification stuff behind and focuses on the main characters, works pretty well. There's a final monologue that illustrates what it's trying to illustrate without getting too poetic about it.
But by that point I was already too angry. I hated...most of this movie.
5/10
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's "Gamer" had a near-mystical effect on me that I'd liken to Bigelow's "Strange Days," Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander," Fellini's post-8½ stuff and most of the work by David Cronenberg. What I mean is I was disturbed – in the most viscerally enjoyable way.
The plot's your run-of-the-mill dose of futurism/cynicism. In America, in the future, death row inmates are controlled via nanobots in their brains by "gamers" for the purposes of a Pay-Per-View combat game called "Slayers." The inmates are hauled to these deserted cities or warehouses and basically act as avatars – these settings bear a close resemblance in design to popular first person shooter games like "Halo." None of the obstacles exist for any reason other than ducking behind to avoid the shrapnel/splatter of exploding bodies.
In the "real world" the gamers game and millions of viewers tune in to watch the latest match. Kable (Gerard Butler) – played by Simon (Logan Lerman) – is the undefeated champion. A few more victorious rounds and he'll be set free. He'd be the first. So there you have the basic plot – it's not wholly unique. What differentiates the movie from garbage like "Death Race" is the style and wit that's put into the images (and their implications). The sequences that take place in "Slayers" are brilliant in how they depict existing video games – yes, in the movie these are real people getting blown apart, but it all looks the same to the viewer, so what's the difference?
These are the sort of questions Neveldine and Taylor are asking, as they did with their equally brilliant "Crank 2." They don't have any answers. Indeed, they tell their satiric/violent stories with an unbridled joy some would mistake for hypocrisy. It's not. Neveldine and Taylor are the voice of their generation, evaluating their detached, sadistic tastes while exploiting them to the enth degree. They're not making excuses for themselves, they're just being honest. It's to their credit their movies can be pulpy, exciting action yarns while sending themselves up so cleverly.
Even more interesting and visually brilliant than the "Slayers" sequences are those set in "Society," a Sims-like game where players utilize the same technology to control human beings in ultra-exaggerated social settings. The players are seen in dark rooms, getting their throws while their far more beautiful avatars engage in endless sex and partying in the "Society" universe. I can't properly describe in words how disturbing this is, you have to see it for yourself.
What the film satirizes most efficiently is our mindless mass servitude to the latest technologies. We don't think about implications, or slippery slopes, we just slide down them – and faster and faster, the movie surmises. This leads to interesting anomalies, like Hackman (Terry Crews), a roid-raged maniac who joins "Slayers" "with no strings," simply, because he wants to. Also, there's a monstrous fat man who seems to sit in his apartment endlessly playing "Society," with Kable's wife (Amber Valetta) as his avatar. These two characters' first meeting provides the film's most repugnant moment. None of this comes off as particularly outlandish.
It's the Valetta character that provides the suspense of the film, which has a pretty standard story. It won't spoil too much to say that Butler escapes, hooks up with some revolutionaries (the "Humanz," who don't escape the film's satire either) and fights his way to the top: "Slayers" and "Society" creator Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). Hey, it's an action movie. But at the same time, it's not.
An action movie is about choreography, stunts. This movie has that, but the engine that drives it is the cinematography – the same could be said for the "Crank" films. It's the camera work and editing (a lot of it) that gives the movie its forward energy. You get caught up in it. There's probably a few hundred shots, and they're all – all – thought-out. They're connected with what came before and pull you into what comes next. This sort of visual dynamism in a B-movie is like taking a breath of fresh air after a decade of "Saws" and "Saw" cousins.
What can I say? Like the best movies, it wraps you up, wrings you out, and you're better off for it.
9/10
The plot's your run-of-the-mill dose of futurism/cynicism. In America, in the future, death row inmates are controlled via nanobots in their brains by "gamers" for the purposes of a Pay-Per-View combat game called "Slayers." The inmates are hauled to these deserted cities or warehouses and basically act as avatars – these settings bear a close resemblance in design to popular first person shooter games like "Halo." None of the obstacles exist for any reason other than ducking behind to avoid the shrapnel/splatter of exploding bodies.
In the "real world" the gamers game and millions of viewers tune in to watch the latest match. Kable (Gerard Butler) – played by Simon (Logan Lerman) – is the undefeated champion. A few more victorious rounds and he'll be set free. He'd be the first. So there you have the basic plot – it's not wholly unique. What differentiates the movie from garbage like "Death Race" is the style and wit that's put into the images (and their implications). The sequences that take place in "Slayers" are brilliant in how they depict existing video games – yes, in the movie these are real people getting blown apart, but it all looks the same to the viewer, so what's the difference?
These are the sort of questions Neveldine and Taylor are asking, as they did with their equally brilliant "Crank 2." They don't have any answers. Indeed, they tell their satiric/violent stories with an unbridled joy some would mistake for hypocrisy. It's not. Neveldine and Taylor are the voice of their generation, evaluating their detached, sadistic tastes while exploiting them to the enth degree. They're not making excuses for themselves, they're just being honest. It's to their credit their movies can be pulpy, exciting action yarns while sending themselves up so cleverly.
Even more interesting and visually brilliant than the "Slayers" sequences are those set in "Society," a Sims-like game where players utilize the same technology to control human beings in ultra-exaggerated social settings. The players are seen in dark rooms, getting their throws while their far more beautiful avatars engage in endless sex and partying in the "Society" universe. I can't properly describe in words how disturbing this is, you have to see it for yourself.
What the film satirizes most efficiently is our mindless mass servitude to the latest technologies. We don't think about implications, or slippery slopes, we just slide down them – and faster and faster, the movie surmises. This leads to interesting anomalies, like Hackman (Terry Crews), a roid-raged maniac who joins "Slayers" "with no strings," simply, because he wants to. Also, there's a monstrous fat man who seems to sit in his apartment endlessly playing "Society," with Kable's wife (Amber Valetta) as his avatar. These two characters' first meeting provides the film's most repugnant moment. None of this comes off as particularly outlandish.
It's the Valetta character that provides the suspense of the film, which has a pretty standard story. It won't spoil too much to say that Butler escapes, hooks up with some revolutionaries (the "Humanz," who don't escape the film's satire either) and fights his way to the top: "Slayers" and "Society" creator Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). Hey, it's an action movie. But at the same time, it's not.
An action movie is about choreography, stunts. This movie has that, but the engine that drives it is the cinematography – the same could be said for the "Crank" films. It's the camera work and editing (a lot of it) that gives the movie its forward energy. You get caught up in it. There's probably a few hundred shots, and they're all – all – thought-out. They're connected with what came before and pull you into what comes next. This sort of visual dynamism in a B-movie is like taking a breath of fresh air after a decade of "Saws" and "Saw" cousins.
What can I say? Like the best movies, it wraps you up, wrings you out, and you're better off for it.
9/10