KICK ASS

(Matthew Vaughn, 2010)

Aaron Johnson, who does just fine, is wrong for the title role here. A valid comparison would be the casting of Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Maguire is geeky-looking, slightly bug-eyed, not too tall or pretty or athletic. He could have been the nerd Peter Parker is meant to be. Johnson, on the other hand, is obviously a handsome boy, and a geeky afro and pair of specs don't really change that. He's also too jocky - tall, broad-shouldered, fit. A young leading man, in other words. Anybody who is cast as a young John Lennon , which is a role requiring a brooding, charismatic, smouldering kind of teen, is wrong for Kick Ass.
Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, finds just the right film for that chihuahua-on-acid energy of his. Here he doesn't feel like he's wandered in out of his bubble of celebrity where its ok to marry Elvis' daughter because hey, you're a big fan and where you should say yes to every film that goes over a certain figure for your salary. Here he feels like he's caught the tone of the film just right, like he even exemplifies it. His Adam West impression is funny for a few seconds, he has plenty of action scene experience, and he doesn't jolt us out of the film with any bizarre line-readings or twitches for once. This and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in the same year or so constituted a  sort of mini-comeback, since squandered.et in New York City, Kick Ass was mostly shot in London, and there are times when the difference between the two cites is all too apparent. London and New York look different, basically. The architecture is different, the street furniture, the shopfronts, the alleyways...Vaughn and his people do well dressing up locations, for the most part, but this New York just feels wrong. It never coalesces into something that feels like a real city, with all its vague locations - lumber warehouse, drug dealers pad in council estate, suburban high school - and for all is references to NYC, the attitude and spirit of the place are utterly absent. It feels plastic. It feels like the generic "Metropolis" which is home to Superman, and is an obvious analogue of New York without being tied to the actual New York in any way. It feels more comic book-influenced then the same city does in Raimi's Spider-Man films. But this is the film that purports to be a realistic view of Super-heroes. Here New York is full of knife-wielding muggers, and there are plenty of darkened alleyways, just like in my 70s Marvels. In some films, geographical uncertainty can work well. David Fincher's Seven, for instance, is set in an unnamed city which we assume is New York for the first two acts of the film. But at the end, as three characters drive out of the city and into the countryside, they drive through the sun-blasted scrub of what can only be California, and the city seems suddenly more likely to be Los Angeles. This small detail shakes an audience a little, rocks its preconceptions and expectations about what it is watching.
I generally hate when films are shot in one place and set in another, though the strange atmospherics of an everycity can be effective in the right hands. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was famously shot in a London standing in for New York, while Vancouver finds itself repeatedly impersonating American cities, often badly. Lost is a treasure trove of city masquerades, as Honolulu impersonates everywhere from London to Seoul to LA. But Lost does it either very well or horrendously badly. Either way is somehow better than the just-slightly off attempt made by Kick Ass.
The most interesting material in both comic and film is in the early scenes, before the arrival of Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the narrative. Here Millar and Vaughn take on the concept of the Super-Hero and its application in a cynical, frightened world, but also a scattershot approach to modern culture, from viral video to cash-in merchandising. Then Hit Girl and Big Daddy show up, and it all turns into a big ridiculous stupidly entertaining action scene. Betraying the influence of both Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Jason Pierson's Body Bags, their characters are hilarious and fun and yet they are a big part of some of the film's problems. In the first act, they are somewhat uncomfortably crowbarred in to a story which is not theirs. And then later Hit Girl's central role is undermined by the fact that she is entirely without an interior life - we see her kill and maim and flip and stab, we see her beaten and shot, but we never have the slightest idea what she is thinking or feeling. This reduces her to a pretty black sight-gag, a flash of Japanese anime in the film's DNA, or perhaps a slightly offensive reduction, a character created purely for fanboys, which is never a good thing. Kick Ass himself, by comparison, is all interior life, as his voiceover fills us in on his every thought and aspiration, rendering him without mystery or much nuance. A better actor than Johnson might have given him more shades of despair or horror, but he remains a two dimensional creation throughout.
The film is the very epitome of the modern genre spectacle. In a post-Tarantino world, that means that it is broadly post-modern, casually fascist and directed with an efficiently anonymous "stylish" sheen. It is also more concerned with being fliply funny than with being an effective action film, sacrificing emotional impact on several occasions for a gag. It has a scene with a heavy video game (read: First Person Shooter) reference in Hit Girl's night vision POV massacre, lots of martial arts and insane gunplay, and a soundtrack littered with pop culture ephemera and rescued trash - Sparks, Joan Jett, the Dickies' version of the Banana Splits theme, the Prodigy's sampling of Manfred Mann and a very Tarantino usage of Morricone's "For A Few Dollars More". In other words, it feels like a DVD movie, the sort of film made for Chapter Selection where you can rewatch favourite scenes and moments.
The worst material in the climactic scenes is not from the comic. The comic stays gritty and horrifying whereas the movie finally aims for purest fantasy in a sort of betrayal of its own earliest impulses. Its a shame.
What Kick Ass is, unexpectedly, is a great portrayal of adolescent male friendship. The protagonist says of himself that he "just exists, like most teenagers". He and his two best friends seem like the film's most authentic element, to me. Their warm camaraderie, based on mutual geekiness and constant ribbing, reminded me of my relationship with my friends at that age. Comic shops, sexual frustration, continual teasing of one another, not belonging to any of the teen tribes - all evoked lightly and wittily. Even if the film has little use for this side of its character, its brilliantly done while it lasts, before the costumes and the fight scenes come out.

KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

(Matthew Vaughn,  2015)

Kingsman makes sure that you know it has the James Bond films in mind from early on, and there are several explicit references. But this film, based on a comic book, accordingly takes a much more comic book angle on the material, making everything even bigger and broader and sillier than most Bond films usually go. It even has a dig at modern 007 - too serious, apparently - and so here that serious nature is replaced by ludicrous action scenes and some lame gags. It actually bears more resemblance to the recent G.I. Joe films than any Bond movies.
The story follows young petty criminal Eggsy (Taron Egerton) after he is saved from prison by Galahad (Firth), an agent of the titular organisation. Firth sponsors him to enter the recruitment process for a new Kingsman, run by Merlin (Mark Strong) while he investigates the scheme cooked up by Internet Billionaire Valentine (Samuel L Jackson). That scheme involves culling the majority of earth's population, and gives rise to one impressive action sequence, where Firth's dapper, old-school agent kills about two dozen people in a berserker fury. Like all of the action scenes here, that one is almost ruined by an over-reliance on CGI, and throughout the film flirts with being a tasteless and embarrassing mess. It has a particular weakness for the obvious; from the choice of music to the product placement to the action beats to the gags, there is nothing surprising or witty here, just a whole lot of boxes being ticked. Some of those boxes work and are undeniably satisfying to watch; others are cringe-inducing and eye-rollingly dumb.
There is also a streak of class warfare running through the plot, with prole Eggsy taking on the Oxbridge Elite and showing them that a pleb can have what it takes, but even that is messy, what with the way the film fetishises upper-class British culture.
The performances barely matter, but Jackson and Firth have fun, while Egerton does what he needs to do. It is massively overlong, but scattered sequences are enjoyable and funny.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

(Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

Once it's settled down into a regulation - if fun - Super-Hero blockbuster with heroes and villains set on a collision course in the massive climax, X-Men: First Class is no better or worse than most of the films released in it's sub-genre over the last decade. There is too much going on, some terrible cgi effects,and some impressive visual spectacle, all of it crammed into a ten minute sequence. But it works, nevertheless, because the first act in particular is a witty, superbly paced and nicely realised piece of expositional storytelling and character creation which lays out the conflicts and sets the stakes for all that follows.
Casting is key; Michael Fassbender finally takes on a movie star role as Magneto-to-be Erik Lensher, and the early sequences of his pursuit of Nazi War Criminals across the globe consciously evoke Connery-era Bond while providing the biggest charge in the film. Much of that is down to Fassbender, whose cold fury and dark charm make Ian McKellan's portrayal of Magneto in the earlier X-Men films look shamefully theatrical and hollow. James McEvoy matches him as Xavier, working a different sort of charm but never less than funny and appealing, and they share some of the film's best scenes. They are surrounded by a strong ensemble, with Kevin Bacon and January Jones lending class to stock villain parts, Rose Byrne all furrowed-brow seriousness as an awed CIA agent, and Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult giving the mutant angst some emotional impact.
The script creaks in places, but the first hour is so hyper-charged and stuffed with characters, locations and action, and Vaughn's hand so confident in his approach, that it positively gallops along, never really pausing for breath. The teen mutants - the "first class" of the title - are a weakness, each of them seeming utterly contemporary in a film set in the 1960s, none of them given much personality beyond their powers. But despite that, this is an assured, thoroughly satisfying summer blockbuster, and vies with Brian Singer's X-Men 2 for the questionable accolade of best X-Men film.