Monday, September 6, 2010

BD impressions: Kick-Ass

11:46 AM / BD Impressions / Comments3 Comments

BD Impressions
Blu-ray

KICK-ASS really didn't grab me in the way that it did some people. It's quite funny. It's quite exciting. It's quite observant. It's a lot of "quite", but it never really comes together to form a single cohesive whole. Tonally it's all over the place, and when you look at the credits - three editors, four music composers - this is perhaps no surprise. It's just never quite sure what it wants to be, and the result is that you end up with a whole lot of extraneous elements all vying for attention. You've got a clumsy character journey (the usual "to be a superhero you just have to believe in yourself" guff), a tacked-on romance subplot (it's telling that, once the final act gets underway, the love interest is completely forgotten about), and the fact that the film seems to start out as a send-up of the superhero genre before, in the second half, just devolving into a generic superhero movie.

As for the much-vaunted Hit Girl, once you get over the fact that you're watching a kid saying bad words and killing people, you start to realise that Chloë Moretz's performance isn't really all that great. Also, while the fact that director Matthew Vaughn financed the entire project himself is an achievement not to be sniffed at, a lot of the CGI and green-screen work is painfully bad, the film's ambition exceeding its budget on a number of occasions.

There's a lot to like in KICK-ASS, and I get the feeling there are two or three great movies in there just itching to get out. The problem is it lacks something to bring it all together, and as a result I ultimately walked away from it feeling unfulfilled.

Image quality: KICK-ASS is one of the most thoroughly unattractive movies I've seen in a long time, and it's hard to determine how many of the BD's shortcomings are a result of deliberate stylistic choices. Most of them, I'd guess. Contrast is dialled up to 11, colours are oversaturated to the point of being blinding, and some judicious grain removal and airbrushing of facial pores makes the image appear incredibly mushy. It actually looks a heck of a lot like another Universal release, MAMMA MIA. If that's the aesthetic Matthew Vaughn was going for, then the BD captures it admirably, but it's one of these cases where it's hard to know where artistic intent stops and technical shortcomings begin. 6/10

Kick-Ass
studio: Universal; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 24.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 29.92 Mbit/sec

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3 Comments

1. bosque said:

If anything, Michael's caps make this release look a lot better than it looks on my screen. Did any of the three editors ever fix on which genre they were going for ? I can forgive that in Yojimbo but not in this. The best thing to say about this movie is that I managed to watch it to the end - which is more than I can say for the make-weight Blockbuster title I rented along with Kick-Ass (Megan's Body).

(Posted on Monday, September 6, 2010 at 10:47 PM)

2. CraigTheRave said:

As expected, a negative review for a hyped, fan favourite movie. Hit-Girl is fantastic and perhaps doesn't have the range of say Meryl Streep, but delivers an instantly iconic performance. As for grumbles about the romantic subplot - come on, this movie was never about romance, that was just to show how becoming Kick-Ass suddenly turned his love life around - it's not meant to be the focus, and are you serious about the 'painfully bad' sepcial effects? I thought the movie looked fantastic throughout, with a colour palett purposly borrowed from Spiderman, so yes its not meant to be all gritty and realistic (hence your questionable image rating of 6 /10) but unatractive? For a comic-book movie the look was perfect.

(Posted on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 2:36 PM)

3. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

I was quite entertained by it and plan to pick up the Blu-ray at some point. I agree it's pretty sloppy in a number of regards, but it really did feel like a comic book movie to me—one that revels in its comic bookiness rather than trying to convert the comic book idea to "the real life."

Though it lacks the main draw the comic had for me: the intense violence. I loved the comic 'cos it was so trashy and bloody. The writing was pretty so-so, and the art was only a step above that. The movie doesn't capture the gruesomeness of the comic. Still, it does translate a lot of the comic pretty well, and the movie kept me entertained from beginning to end.

(Posted on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 11:25 PM)

 
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