4. Sexualizing Hit-Girl
Hit-Girl is f*cking awesome. Fans love her, casual movie goers love her, even curmudgeonly old people love her. The thrill of watching a 10 year old girl curse like a pirate and dismember bad guys is incomparable. Mindy is the type of girl who doesn't give two s**ts about boys, making friends, looking pretty, or any other typical girl things. Her one and only interest is her mission, and that's what makes her so unique. Now, Millar has a relatively easy time portraying this, because no matter how long he takes to write the comics, he has the liberty of keeping his character perpetually young. Wadlow was not so lucky with his job; in the years that have passed between Kick-Ass 1 and 2, Hit-Girl actress Chloe Grace Moretz has turned from a little kid into a teenager. Therefore, Wadlow was faced with a choice: Ignore this completely and pretend Mindy is still in Junior High, or actually acknowledge her teenage-hood and all the problems that come with it. Understandably, Wadlow chose the latter. But there is a way he could have done this without selling the heart and soul of Hit-Girl down the river. But sell he did, and at a very high price. Case in point, the slumber party scene. The cool kids invite Mindy over for some fun time, and immediately rip into her for never having kissed a boy. The scene starts out well enough, with at least one hilarious joke - "Why don't I shove my foot up your snatch?" That's Hit-Girl. What's not Hit-Girl? Watching a music video featuring shirtless boys, getting turned on and moaning a little. There's even a few camera close-ups of her waist while she tightly clenches her jacket. I kid you not. This is how Jeff Wadlow has chosen to present Hit-Girl: As a confused teenager encountering her first awkward sexual experiences. If I'd wanted to see that I would have put on "Juno" or "Hard Candy" or whatever other uncomfortable film Ellen Page is starring in these days. But I certainly didn't expect or want to see that with Hit-Girl, and I'm pretty sure no one else did. But in Kick-Ass 2 we are subjected to scene after scene of Chloe Moretz dolling herself up for the camera's perverted eyes and consequently draining herself of all that special Hit-Girl-ness. She even takes revenge on the girls in the most un-Mindy way possible - by fixing her hair, throwing on a ton of make-up and wearing a skirt so low-cut that she might as well be a hired escort. This violates Hit-Grl's integrity. Hit-Girl doesn't try to beat bitches at their own game; she hangs bitches off buildings and threatens them with death if they don't play nice. Even if I wasn't a pissed off comic fan, I still wouldn't like the sexualizing of Hit-Girl. Chloe Moretz is just 16 years old, and its frankly weird and gross to watch as the camera fetishizes her. When she shows up in her skirt or gets visibly turned on, Wadlow seems to want us to get into it the way we would, say, when, when Halle Berry bursts out of the ocean in her bathing suit in Die Another Day. And seeing as how Chloe is 16, unless you're a teen boy in the audience, this sort of filmic treatment of her gets awkward for the viewer. It surely must have been awkward for poor Chloe too. Which makes me wonder just what the hell Wadlow was thinking. Is he just, as Dave's friend Todd would say, an "ultra-pedo?" I think it more likely is a case of misfired audience appeal. He probably went into this movie with a wide awareness of Hit-Girl's popularity, and sought to exploit it in the easiest and most obvious way possible. Wadlow's mistake was misinterpreting Hit-Girl's "cool" as "hot." Clearly a young girl waving around weapons and cussing is cool, but it's not hot. Wadlow seems to have forgotten both her age and the very reason fans love her:
because she's just an innocent kid who slaughters bad guys. He tried to make her more than that, and by doing so, he made her so much less. I understand the need to tackle her teenage-hood, but this could have been done without ruining her character if - for example - her struggle to fit in were more inward instead of outward. If Wadlow had been clever, Hit-Girl's struggle in this movie could have been why she DOESN'T feel like a normal teenager. She could go through the movie feeling unreactive to all the crap thrown her way by the girls, to the point where she begins to question why she doesn't care more. She'd start to wonder if maybe there really is something wrong with her, and doubt whether she'll ever become a truly normal person. It would have been a far more philosophical conundrum for Hit-Girl, one more in keeping with the tone of the comics, and one too probing and thoughtful for Wadlow to have come up with. Which brings me to my next category...