Kick-Ass 2 and the Increase in Super Violence

by Christopher Barr

“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”  - Mahatma Gandhi

The 2010 carnage filled comic book movie, Kick-Ass was a fun and exciting flick with interesting and colorful characters.  But it also advocated violence without any real consequences and promoted vigilantism.  It’s a movie about a teenage boy who gets picked on to a point of having enough.  He decides to push back, not as Dave Lizewski but as his new found alter ego, Kick-Ass.  He meets up with a father and daughter alone his journey and teams up with them to fight crime.  To me, one of the more disturbing aspects of the movie is the relationship and actions of the father and daughter duo, Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.

I can easily confess that Hit-Girl was my favorite.  She was funny and she could kick-ass more than Kick-Ass could.  So as a throw away popcorn movie, I found this part to be the high light.  But that doesn't excuse the fact that Big Daddy and Hit-Girl were a violent, unforgiving duo.  They maliciously murdered without remorse and laughed about it.  The problem is the discourse left the safety of comic book page and was translated into a very real looking authentic portrait of actual violence.  The movie created vigilantes and unleashed them on a crime boss and his goons to such an extreme, that one might become confused when discerning who the bad guys really were.

There is something disturbingly odd about an 11 year old little girl, skillfully, expiring a slew of baddies with a boastful smile and a pretty face.  Part of that gag was that she remains a cute little girl and a violent murdering assassin in one.  But all this real world violence is masked by the fact they are wearing costumes and are acting as real life superheroes.  Matilda was a 12 year old little girl in the film The Professional that was taught by Leon, a skilled hit-man in the art of assassinations.  But yet in that film, there were real consequences and there was no joy in what they were doing.  It was a story about redemption and revenge, revenge for Matilda and redemption for Leon, but in Kick-Ass its revenge for the father and ultimately victim-of-circumstance for the little girl, who was lead into an assassin’s life style without ever really knowing better.  Great parenting, Big Daddy.

Despite the fact that the Kick-Ass films are all good and fun, they don’t get the concept of what it is to be a hero.  Peter Parker as Spider-man never resorted to excessive violence to catch and stop the villain.  He used his wit and skills to catch the bad guys and leave them for the authorities to prosecute. Batman left the Joker hanging from the side of a building in The Dark Knight for the police to arrest in spite of the Joker killing his long time love Rachel Dawes.  He did this because he’s a moral man, he believes that, like the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, ‘If the blind lead the blind, we all end up in the ditch.’

It’s important to note the obvious; movies don’t kill people.  Quentin Tarantino films are all violent, but his films play with violence, cartoon-like as in the case of The Bride mowing through 88 assassins with a Hattori Hanzo sword in the middle of Kill Bill Vol.1.  Then there’s the scene where Mr. Orange shoots Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs for violently torturing the cop they had tied up for questioning. Oliver Stone can’t be directly blamed for real world murders that followed the release of his ultra-violent 1994 film, Natural Born Killers.  Fight Club was violent but promoted a moral philosophy that I’m sure many over looked for the fight scenes but never the less, consequences were defined.

Kick-Ass 2, like most blockbuster sequels, opted for the bigger, louder, less awesome than the first one, route.  The movie added more ‘superheroes’ to the fold, illustrating more people seem to not have any faith in the police to clean the streets up.  These heroes approached criminality like an immature joke.  Laughing and joking how cool it is to be a fantasy in the real world.  The body count in this sequel was high like the first one, where taunting and torturing the ‘bad guys’ was equally as popular, if not more.  The movie bounced schizophrenic-like around its moral philosophy like a pin-ball machine.  Never really focusing on whether what they were doing was wrong or necessary in a society with increasing violence.  It seemed to focus more on looking cool when they avenged the so called innocent.

Jim Carrey took a stand against the film in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings.  Back in June, Carrey tweeted, “I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence … my apologies to others involved with the film.  I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”  Carrey, playing Colonel Stars and Stripes, certainly had his fair share of violent scenes but I think after seeing the end product, a near-rape scene by the character The Motherfucker with goons laughing about it, the outright slaughter of eight NYPD officers,  he decided that maybe it’s better to step back and bow this one out.

The problem is we live in a hyper-violent society where morality often gets side tracked for the humiliation and the inhumane brutality of other human beings.  There is something oddly liberating for some of us to see or be directly involved in hurting others.  I think the reason why this mentality of violence is so pervasive is because we are becoming more detached from the emotional connection we all possess for one in other.  I think like a push-and-pull, without nurturing one, the other inevitably rises.  In this case, the atavistic desires that we all checked at the door to form a civilization without violence, has resurfaced like a sharks dorsal fin slicing the water as it approaches, killing innocents and intellectual progress in its path.