5. Inappropriate Comedy
Part of the fun of the Kick-Ass comic series is its satirizing of violence. Yes it can be dark, edgy and dramatic, but Millar knows how to have fun with the darkness too. He knows fans want to see blood and guts. Thus it's completely exaggerated, and becomes almost Quentin Tarantino-like in its depiction. Much of the comedy flows naturally from the violence. So even when the Mother F**ker slaughters dozens of innocent civilians, his narcissistic ranting inspires a chuckle. When Hit-Girl plunges swords into the faces of criminals it's so over the top you can't help but laugh your ass off. The potentially awkward paring of disturbing violence with satirized comedy works for Millar, but Wadlow does away with it completely. Take the scene where Hit-Girl takes revenge on the mean girls (pun intended) for leaving her alone in the woods. Rather than the inspired roof top hanging from the comic, she takes out some absurd weapon called the Sick Stick (clearly a product of Wadlow's own uninspired imagination) which causes the girls immediate explosive diarrhea and uncontrollable vomiting. Ummmm.... why is this funny exactly? I don't find vomiting particularly hilarious. I suppose the goal was to get all the other kids in the lunch room to laugh at the girls for hurling chunks everywhere. But frankly if I'd been sitting in the lunch room and witnessed this, my first instinct would be to immediately stop eating my lunch and swear vengeance on the lunch lady. The scene is just so crude and ugly, and lacks any of the zing from the revenge scene of the comic. There's no basis of character or purpose, it's just a sell-out for gross-out humor that neither amuses nor feels like a satisfying revenge for Hit-Girl. A scene like this would fare better in Jackass, or American Pie, or some other teen schlock flick. But perhaps the worst offender in the comedy department is Mother F**ker's rape of Night Bitch. The scene in the comic (featuring Katie Deuxma instead of Night Bitch) is presented as truly horrifying and disturbing. The rape is meant to show the brutality of real world super villainy, and it doesn't pull any punches. But, shockingly, Wadlow decided to use this scene to play up the comedy. Mother F**ker barges into her house, has his cronies roughly pin Night Bitch to the wall, unzips his pants and... can't get it up. This results in what I'm sure Wadlow intended as a HILARIOUS attempt for Mother F**ker to get an erection by jerking himself off. Not only is this completely unfunny and awkward, it's a shameful attempt to gloss over genuine brutality. Millar's key to weaving both comedy and drama into the comic is knowing how to balance them, to fuse the comedy and drama when appropriate. The comedy never rings as an attempt to cover the drama, rather it works in tandem with it. But here the comedy is a shallow attempt to hide the ugliness. If Wadlow had really felt the rape was too much for the movie he should have done away with it altogether. By including the rape and glossing it over he actually draws more attention to it. It makes Wadlow look callous and disinterested, as though cramming in a rape scene is no big deal. If he had given the scene its proper dramatic tone it would have had a purpose for the story, spurring on Kick-Ass's hatred of Mother F**ker. Instead the scene is just awkwardly in there, seeming completely unnecessary and all the more unsettling because of it. And speaking of unsettling...