Of Friday’s superhero flick “Kick-Ass,” England’s Daily Mail recently wrote, “It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualized view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.”
Someone must be doing something right.
In fact, it’s the wildly over-the-top action and outrageous tone that is likely to attract audiences in the first place, as well as give them something to talk about afterward.
And the ringleader of the mayhem is Hit Girl, a foulmouthed, 12-year-old killing machine who wields machine guns, butterfly knives and two adorable pigtails.
To play her, Vaughn chose Chloe Moretz, now 13, whose previous role in “My Friends Tigger & Pooh” did not provide her with the necessary weapons training.
“I did about four or five months of training before the movie started,” Moretz says. “I did a thousand crunches a night and, like, 70 push-ups and pull-ups.” She also became handy with a butterfly knife.
Besides her ability to kill bad guys with an extensive arsenal, Hit Girl also has the power to stun everyone in the room with her mouth. In one shocking moment, she drops the C-word before carving up a battalion of mobsters.
The original script didn’t contain the expletive (though the comic did), and Vaughn initially decided to cut the line completely. However, after a conference with Moretz and her mother, the group decided the vulgar word needed to be added for impact’s sake.
“Of course I’ve heard that word,” Moretz admits, “but if I ever said it outside of this role, my mom and dad would ground me for the rest of my life.”It will come as little surprise that “Kick-Ass” is based on a comic book. The series, created by Scottish writer Mark Millar and American artist John Romita Jr., imagines what would happen if an ordinary person decided to become a super hero.
Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson) is a nerdy teen who, mostly out of boredom, orders a wetsuit online, chooses the moniker Kick-Ass and takes to the New York streets, doling out vigilante justice. His first few outings do not go well.
Later, he teams up with three other costumed heroes — Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and Hit Girl — to take down a crime boss (Mark Strong).
Director Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) had trouble drumming up interest in the film at the major studios. “Most of them said they liked the concept, but only if it was done in a PG-13 manner with no Hit Girl,” he says.
All involved were determined to keep the property’s irreverent tone and hard-R violence, so the movie was ultimately financed independently.
The filmmakers also refused to compromise on Hit Girl. Which means that Moretz now only has to wait four short years before she’s legally allowed to see her film without a chaperone.