On the fuck and the beast

There is only one problem with the film "Kick-Ass": it is not clear how to decline the title. No more problems with the movie "Kick-Ass"

What did we go to? On "Kick-Ass"? On Pip? On "Pipe"? All options cause nervous laughter. But that's the way it should be. This is the funniest, bloodiest, most unexpected and one of the smartest films of spring 2010.

It starts as American Pie, continues as a parody of every comic book imaginable, from Spiderman to Batman to anime to Sin City, mentioning Sunset Boulevard and Lost in vain. And then suddenly it goes off the rails and turns into a powerful saga of honor and destiny, although these words are never even spoken in the film.

An ordinary teenager who jerks off almost every photo of a half-naked woman, one day decides to become a superhero. He buys himself a green wetsuit, comes up with an idiotic nickname Kick-Ass (in the original he is Kick-Ass) and goes outside to fight evil. Evil, of course, immediately wins, and the teenager ends up in the hospital. As a result, he loses the ability to feel pain, so that he can now endure beatings a little longer than ordinary people. There are other fighters for justice in the city - Papanya (the best role of Nicolas Cage!) and his 11-year-old daughter Killer. Their goal is to deal with the big mafia boss, and Kick-Ass accidentally finds himself in all this mess.

Usual superhero bullshit? Not really. As some "Speed ​​Racer" could be considered an autistic fantasy, so "Kick-Ass" behaves as if this wanking teenager invents a wonderful world for himself, which he stands for. Pure drive, going either into awkward teenage erotica, or into a bloody anime, or into the scariest terrorist live broadcast, where heroism is burned alive. Kick-Ass differs from the usual superheroes in that his "superhumanity" is not based on anything, it is an act of goodwill. No poisonous spiders, radiation, medical experiments and so on. Kick-Ass doesn't even have any superpowers and is aware that he's just a "stupid fuck in a wetsuit". But isn't that the definitive definition of a superhero? Kick-Ass leads a "perfect combination of loneliness and despair" - but that's the fate of all superhumans in the end.

The film begins with the question: why hasn't anyone tried to be a superhero? No, why not, they tried. The streets of Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris are roamed by a bunch of people who earn superheroism for a living. Walk around in costumes, take pictures with the kids, advertise some of the latest products. On Halloween, All Saints Day, there is nowhere to go from superheroes.

Superheroes have become all the saints of modern pop culture - and have ceased to be fond of saving humanity. They always responded to what is happening in the world, and by their behavior it was possible to understand what worries civilization. For example, a comic book about Superman and the aftermath of an atomic explosion appeared in the New York Post in April 1945. Watchmen by Alan Moore came out in 1986 and became a requiem for the Cold War. Today's superheroes have been distracted from social problems and gone into a showdown with themselves: Spider-Man suffers from his "dark half", Batman gloomily flies over the gray plain of New York, similar to black lightning, and deliberately exposes himself in the most unfavorable light. Iron Man no longer wants to trade weapons of mass destruction, the Hulk is trying to squeeze out of himself drop by drop - himself. "Kick-Ass" is the next step, superheroism here is not a psychological problem, but just a good intention.

Kick-Ass is based on the comic strip by Scotsman Mark Millar that rethinks the very idea of ​​superheroes: they're just people in stupid costumes who want to do something good. Millar is the author of "Especially Dangerous", and already there he talked about a nerd who became a warrior. "Kick-Ass" is dirtier, simpler, and more obvious. The gap between an office clerk and a superman is, in fact, no greater than between an ordinary person and a person who has decided to help people.

Millar considers "Kick-Ass" "the most naive and idealistic film" in years. This is despite the fact that blood is gushing from the screen, like in some kind of educational film about a slaughterhouse, and the crusade of children and teenagers goes under a vigorous mat. Seeing all those words that begin in Russian with "x" and "p" that the Killer Girl uses in comics, the editors warned Millar that "Americans don't talk like that." Millar responded: “At the end of Star Wars, when the Death Star explodes, we understand that the sound of the explosion in space cannot be heard. So what? Because it's cool."

The mat explodes in the usual "superhero" surroundings, like the Death Star. There are two versions of the translation in the Russian box office: the standard one, that is, without the obscene language, and the extremely limited obscene one - “the regions asked,” the distributors say. Obscene will be shown only at night screenings in several non-Moscow cinemas, with special notice. At the Moscow premiere, the film was in Goblin's translation, and now negotiations are underway to have three translations on the DVD, which is expected in mid-May - not only obscene and non-obscene, but also Goblin.

It is customary to call the hero of comics in Russian Scuffle, the fans suggested the option Zhopoder, but in the film the hero's nickname sounds like Kick-Ass, and the Goblin's translation offers a touching Podzhopnik. The Goblin himself believes that the name Podzhopnik is very suitable for the main character: “A stupid word that a person cannot call himself. Foolish and stupid."

The hero is just like that - stupid and stupid. The superman everyone beats. His girlfriend thinks he's gay, his teacher thinks he's a preoccupied loser. Yes, what heroism is there, he can’t even catch a runaway cat. Such clumsy, nervous superheroes were Timurovites or pioneers, who took away old women from each other in order to take them across the road. And all the rest - those who were in a hurry to do stupid good. Sometimes this led to bloody rivers.

The comic book "Face Fight" appeared in 2008, and talk about the film adaptation went right away. Director Matthew Vaughn made this movie a colorful fireworks display of teenage stupidity and hope, a battle of hormones for a better future. The camera dances a macabre tango with the superheroes, defying convention and dodging red splashes. “If you give the public what they want, they will be bored,” the director is convinced. - There are no rules. Do whatever you want, just respect the boundaries. You don’t need to poke people in the eyes with your fingers, you need to do something completely unexpected and at the same time accessible, funny and not stupid.”

If you watch Matthew Vaughn's previous films, Layer Cake and Stardust, now, after the release of Kick-Ass, you grab your head: where were we before? Here is the perfect director for comics: nervous, sharp fights, witty editing, constant attempts to bring what is happening, unbridled drive. This kind of drive - the adrenaline rush of a man who knows what he wants - Vaughn caught, perhaps from Guy Ritchie, when he produced his Cards, Money, Two Smoking Barrels. In a fairy tale like Stardust, such energy was out of place; in the drug thriller Layer Cake, it ruined an already weak script. Everything worked out in Pip.

The film managed to do what the film adaptation of "Watchmen" with all the genius of Alan Moore's graphic novel did not: find the line where it is impossible to distinguish ordinary people from superheroes. "Keepers" showed superheroes as people - tired, aging, unnecessary. "Kick-Ass" turns a teenage nerd and an 11-year-old girl into supermen, the direct heiress of Matilda from "Leon", only better trained. "Kick-Ass" shows how the modern world works. There are superheroes, villains and spectators in the world - and no one else. When superheroes fight villains on the street, viewers film it all on their mobile phones and then post it on the Internet. When the villains beat the superheroes tied to the chairs, the audience turns on the TV so as not to miss a single second of the live broadcast, to see every drop of the blood of the heroes, to watch how the pipets come.

This pipe is not complete. He's happy, lanky, naive, and awfully cute. During the day he stains a bunch of napkins, and at night he saves the world. Like all of us.