10 Movie Messages Completely Undermined By Their Ending
7. Normal People Would SUCK At Being Superheroes - Kick-Ass
The big, hilarious hook of Kick-Ass is that it's an irreverent, expectation-defying superhero movie which shows just how terrible the average person - let alone teenage boy - would be at playing superhero.
Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a comic book fan who decides to become a vigilante superhero, assuming the alter-ego Kick-Ass.
Much of the film focuses on how hilariously pathetic Kick-Ass is, summarily getting his ass kicked and ultimately having to be bailed out by two "real" superheroes, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz).
Dave even considers quitting the crime-fighting life for good, but ultimately decides to help take down crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong).
Yet the film's finale sees Kick-Ass don a freakin' jetpack with mini-guns to wipe out Frank's men, before blowing Frank up with a bazooka. Kick-Ass then flies away to safety with his jetpack, and even gets the girl, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca).
This is quite different to Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s original comic, which offers a far more cynical, caustic version of this story, where Dave doesn't become a genuinely awesome superhero and Katie brutally rejects him for lying about being gay.
Instead, the movie becomes a bit too much like the very thing it's satirising, while delivering a pretty conventional superhero origin story at the end of the day.