Subvert and Destroy: "Kick-Ass" and the case for Nicolas Cage

For a long time now it has become popular to mock Nicolas Cage and his decade long streak of bad role choices. More popular than Robert Patterson…uh, Paddington….Patterhorn? That sparkly dude from “Twilight.” And that kid’s, like, totally on fire right now, so, there’s a strong analogy right? Okay, off to a great start….My point is that ever since that ever since, let’s say, “Gone In Sixty Seconds” Nic Cage has been an easy target for smug film schoolers to scoff at while writing scripts about twenty-year-olds coming to terms with things. But let’s face it: Nicolas Cage is the Bobby Fisher of playing crazy. Yes, Nicolas Cage is in mostly bad movies but all I’m saying is to think about how bad those movies would be without Nicolas Cages. So please film students, I merely ask that you pause your “Royal Tenebaums” DVDs and pull up your pants and consider that for a moment.

“Kick-Ass” features Cage as Big Daddy, a man who’s part Batman and part Mr. Rogers. By day he wears cardigan sweaters and sips hot cocoa, by night he dispenses justice at the end of a shotgun. Actually, most of the justice dispensed by Big Daddy is at the hands of his 11-year-old daughter whom he’s trained in the deadly arts of gunplay, swordsmanship, and being deceptively adorable. So in that sense he’s sort of the third party administrator for justice. Hit Girl, played by a precocious young actress whose previous film credit was “Tigger and Pooh and a Musical Too”, delivers up a thoracic surgeon’s ransom in carnage all the while mouthing off to the bad guys with language that would make a veteran merchant mariner blush.

(There is a carnival of madness just behind this man's handlebar mustache.)

There are other heroes as well but it’s these two that stole the show and I really would like the two of them to get the credit they deserve for their roles because, more than the other characters, they subvert all the comic book hero conventions. In the universe of “Kick-Ass” a scrawny 6th-graders and her soft spoken father are more dangerous than an army of mob hitmen. In every other comic book film they would have died in the first scene in order for the superhero to spend the rest of the movie avenging them. We in the audience cheer for Big Daddy and Hit Girl yet, at the same time, are we really supposed to be rooting for a man who trains his daughter to kill with sociopathic glee and who is himself, to put it mildly, crazier than a barrel of Glenn Becks?

More than the gallons of blood I think this is what has the moral outragers morally outraged. But that’s the point of the film. Behind every bad-ass killing machine is a man with severe psychological problems, behind every hero is a frightened child, and not often, but sometimes, two wrongs do make a right.

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