So, I’ve seen it.
There are some changes from the comic book . . . and they’re all the safe changes necessary to make this film able to be released.
For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil it for you. Is it worth seeing? Oh yeah . . . mainly on the strength of Chloe Moretz’s performance. She’s definitely got some acting chops. I wasn’t blown away, but I was impressed.
Beyond that, it’s pretty much exactly like the comic book has been wrung through a focus-test. Lots of people hate Millar’s writing. I think he’s a bit of a douchecanoe myself, but the comic-book version of Wanted was honest enough to be really unsettling. That’s a good work of fiction, even if the story itself revels in awfulness. The film version was nothing like it, verging on Uwe Boll territory of straying from the material. Why? Because no one would dare film Wanted as written. Not in a million, billion years. A story where the main character is a complete psychopath? Who murders, steals, and destroys as he sees fit? Who never undergoes a redemption? Who is at long last an unabashed monstrosity? No way. People’s heads would explode. The audience would revolt, because for good or for ill, the last damn thing the majority of the movie-going public wants is to be challenged.
I’m not talking about a mental challenge. I’m not saying they’re stupid. I’m saying nobody would willingly pay ten bucks to be told in graphic, one hundred million dollar detail that the trappings of their life are easily rendered null and void, where they’re faced with the real awfulness of everyday life (and not in comic, sad trombone style, but in the glaring honesty of how the daily grind does exactly that), where every undignified and sad occurance of living is writ large and shoved in their faces. Nobody wants to deal with that. Nobody wants to face those things. Nobody wants someone to kick down the doors of their existence and point out the flaws. That’s the kind of challenge that would send a theater into anarchy.
So what was done to Wanted was done to Kick-Ass. The dark, ugly turns of the comic are discarded in order to make sure nobody squirms too much. There are triumphant notes inserted in all the right places, the formula of a hero’s journey is obeyed verbatim, and the result is the same fucking movie I’ve already seen twenty times. Jesus. People, if you’re going to pump up this movie with a comic that Millar could barely be arsed to write half the time, could you at least stay true to what it got right?
Kick-Ass was an ugly, brutal little piece of fiction, an antithesis to the shining light of the usual heroes. That’s what Millar does: he takes the conventions of the genre, puts it in a blender, surgically implants it in the brain of an angry goat and puts it on YouTube. He’s a nasty and brutal writer. But something else he’s certainly good at is pandering to the suits, and I’m sure he’s being more than well compensated for this deconstruction of his deconstruction.
Go see it. Away from all this baggage, it’s a good movie and it’s entertaining. But as you’re watching it, remember that the people in Hollywood made sure to take all the sharp edges off first so you don’t hurt yourselves.
