REVIEW: Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010) *****

reviewed by David Sugarman

All tabloid controversy over murderous, foul-mouthed children aside for a moment, I’ve been anticipating this film eagerly since I first saw the trailer a few months ago. Finally getting to see the murderous, foul-mouthed child in action, I was not disappointed.

Kick-Ass is a superhero movie without superheroes, but this is no Watchmen. Far from the humourless, foreboding darkness of Zack Snyder’s film, Kick-Ass‘s costumed figures are human, touching and most of all just downright hilarious. The title character is played with genuine pathos by Aaron Johnson, who some of you may have seen in the John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, around Christmas. Kick-Ass – or Dave Lizewski, to give him his real name – is an ordinary teenager who wants to know why nobody has ever tried to be superhero before. So he tries it out, even without a superpower. Soon, he’s in way over his head, bringing him to the attention of the aforementioned killer-child her father.

The child in question is 11-year old Mindy Macready, alias Hit Girl, trained by her father, Damon Macready/Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage at his comedic best) to stab, slice, shoot and fight with the prowess of a career assassin. Though it’s Johnson, as Dave, who brings the real humanity to the film, managing to seem not just vulnerable but extra-vulnerable, it’s Chloe Moretz’s Hit Girl who steals the show. If Kick-Ass is remembered even half as fondly as it should be in 10 years, it’ll be Hit Girl that people quote; she’s a cinematic idol waiting to be discovered, to be placed on a plinth alongside Jules Winnfield and Keyser Soze.

What Kick-Ass does best, though, is action. Really, really great action sequences – the best of which invariable feature Hit Girl wreaking carnage on the unsuspecting goons of mobster Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and his son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Last year I went to see J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek and was surprised to find it was one of the most enjoyable films of the year. This year, that surprise film is Kick-Ass, which I think is even better than Star Trek. It’s about as much fun as you’re legally allowed to have in the cinema.

REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2009) ***

reviewed by David Sugarman

OK, confession time: I’ve never seen a Guy Ritchie film all the way through before. Nor have I ever watched a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, or read any of the books. Yes, I know. Ridiculous, but I’m going to pretend that this puts me at an advantage to view the oft-derided Ritchie’s latest movie with an unbiased eye.

The eponymous hero is played here by American actor Robert Downey, Jr., a Holmes of erudite speech, quick mind and a great talent for physical violence, as evinced in the film’s magnificently executed opening sequence and one entertaining but highly unnecessary shirtless bare-knuckle boxing fight. His more-than-able assistant Dr. Watson, typically portrayed as an overweight, bumbling comic figure, is here played by Jude Law, looking rather svelte in a grey suit and dapper moustache. The pre-title sequence involves Holmes and Watson interrupting a supposedly occult murder by Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), and the rest of the film is concerned with the fall-out of this arrest, as Blackwood is tried, convicted, executed- and apparently resurrected. The duo’s attempts to solve the mystery involve a masonic cult, the House of Lords, inept policemen, bald giants, ginger midgets and a foxy former squeeze of Sherlock’s, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams).

The resulting film is more Bond than Holmes, but all the more entertaining for it. While one may argue that there is rather more violence than necessary, and that several of the fight scenes are somewhat annoyingly prolonged, the dynamism of the film is hard to resist. Ritchie and his screenwriters, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg, both acknowledge their seemingly irreverent approach to the source material and strive to create a piece of narrative cinema of depth and importance. Despite their efforts, Sherlock Holmes rarely moves above being a highly enjoyable adventure movie. The characters are functional but never fully realised, and none of the supporting characters are particularly memorable. The film’s greatest success is possibly its biggest weakness; Robert Downey, Jr. is electric and charismatic as the troubled Holmes, but quite what these troubles are is a vague and unresolved question that the film either does not want to or forgets to answer. One suspects it may be the latter. Downey, Jr. is the best thing in the film, and with him it works- with a lesser actor, Sherlock Holmes could have been an admirable failure, rather than a very decent action-comedy.