I watched Kickass 2 last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. But at the same time I was genuinely horrified to see that several people brought small children the show. One thing I’ve learned about becoming a geek dad, as opposed to merely a geek, is that you find yourself suddenly ambivalent about things you would never worry about for yourself. So I present to you a somewhat schizophrenic review, in which I take both the pro and the con view.
Pro
This movie is fun, with enough gory acrobatic fight scenes to warm the cockles of your nerdy heart, and the requisite one-liners and potty humor to delight your inner adolescent. Yet it is also surprisingly serious and interesting, at times. Here you have the eponymous hero Kickass returned as somewhat older, wiser and more capable. He’s an evolving character, but very much still on the hero’s journey from man to superman (small S), and much closer to the former. That makes him eminently relatable as a good guy who doesn’t have any special powers but just wants to do his bit to make the community safer. He’s not quite the innocent fool he was in the first movie, playing super hero for its own sake. He understands that he’s in the real world and that people get hurt and experience loss, and yet he chooses to put himself in the line of fire anyway. He grows from someone playing at hero into a real hero. Meanwhile Hit Girl, who started out super, grapples with the humanity that she never had the time to develop. Although I’ve read some reviews that suggest her experimentation with normal human interactions somehow “ruined” the character, I find the thoughtful moral agent trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life much more interesting that the tiny killer robot we saw in the first film. In the end she decides that Hit Girl is who she really is, coming full circle, but the evolution is that she grows from someone following another person’s plan for her (her father) into a person following her own, albeit similar plan for herself.
Con
This movie is not for kids and would probably do harm to anyone that hasn’t learned to distinguish parody from earnest violence. As an adult having seen a generation of violent movies I understand that the makers of Kickass are implicitly criticizing the callousness of modern cinema by taking it to a grotesque extreme. But what a kid will see is people killing, torturing, maiming, and (in one scene) attempting to rape other human beings with a smile on their faces and laughter in their hearts. This is a movie where killing is a game, pain is funny, the slaughter of ten police officers is played for laughs. I don’t think I particularly buy into the notion of movies causing violence, but I can very much see how exposure to films like this could make a child at least indifferent to violence. This is the sort of movie that desensitizes young eyes to brutality, and encourages violence as a solution to problems.
My conclusion?
If you’re an emotionally stable adult with a firm grasp on reality then by all means go to this movie and revel in the sheer excess. But do hire a sitter.
Back in the mid 90s when Jurassic Park came out I went to see it at the theatre. Sitting behind me was a mother with a young boy who had to be about 3 or 4 years of age. He suffered through most of the late portions of the movie, screaming and crying. I finally turned around and gave her a look and she said “he’s scared.” Yeah, no kidding.
Some parents are simply born stupid and never outgrow it… I fully believe that. That said, Jurassic Park is a Saturday morning cartoon compared to today’s PG-13 and R rated movies, and I can’t believe theatres allow parents to bring young kids.
I had a similar experience when I went to see Starship Troopers and saw numerous kids ranging from 5-10. They did not look like geek parents so I assumed they had not read the book, but I couldn’t believe the theater didn’t at least warn them. Back in the 80s I remember theaters being very strict with the R rating and teenagers using fake IDs to get in.
Something similar happened when I went to see Spawn, particularly bad for kids since it involved a very ugly, very evil demon clown. The parents in front of us stayed planted in their seats as their 2 children ran from the theater with their hands over their eyes. To make matters worse, their kids stayed out of the theater for at least 30 minutes. I should have gone to the theater management but struggled with the drama that would have been created for getting involved. Being older and wiser now, I don’t think I could ignore something like that again.