Profanity-slinging kid does damage in Kick-Ass' By MARK CARO
A pistols-wielding girl massacres a suite's worth of thugs, exchanges brutal blows with the kingpin and uses language that might make David Mamet blush - if only because it's coming out of the mouth of an 11-year-old girl. The movie may be called "Kick-Ass," a title that already has some parents shielding their young'uns from the marketing campaign, but the pre-release publicity has focused less on the high school-age male title character than the diminutive Hit Girl, played by now-13-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz. One of the film's explicit trailers plays like Hit Girl's greatest hits, complete with her dropping "f" and "c" bombs and shooting a doorman through the cheek while dressed in a schoolgirl outfit. This is all played for kicks, of course. Director Matthew Vaughn's R-rated "Kick-Ass," which opens Friday, is a comic book movie based on the work of Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr., so everything is delivered inside giant, nothing-reallycounts quotation marks. Still, you can't forget that you are watching an 11-year-old girl causing violent mayhem and taking punches in the face from an adult, all while out-cussing Tony Soprano. Sure, you can't take your eyes off Hit Girl, but is this a good thing? "I don't know that it means anything other than the destruction of civilization as we know it," joked film critic-historian Leonard Maltin. "There's always that question of whether movies lead social change or reflect it. I always think the answer is somewhere in the middle, but there's no question that movies and TV shows have broken down or dissolved a lot of barriers of what is considered acceptable for men and women and boys and girls." Hit Girl certainly marks the extreme end of a progression that can be traced back a few decades. Audiences were shocked when Linda Blair spewed profanities and vomit as the12-year-old possessed girl of "The Exorcist" (1973), though they could console themselves that it was the devil's doing. Also in1973, Tatum O'Neal played the sassy-mouthed (PG-rated), cigarettesmoking, 9-year-old con artist of Peter Bogdanovich's "Paper Moon"; she became the youngest Oscar winner, for best supporting actress, the next year. Jodie Foster became another troubledgirl icon with her Oscar-nominated performance as the 12-year-old prostitute of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976). No cheap thrills were meant to be derived from her mean-streets situation; here was a girl who needed protection - and got it from Robert De Niro's unhinged title character. Yet the director's seriousminded intentions couldn't keep John Hinckley Jr. from being so smitten with Foster that he tried to impress her by shooting President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Thematically, the closest movie precedent to Hit Girl may be Natalie Portman's 12-year-old Mathilda, who learns hit man Jean Reno's tricks so she can avenge her murdered family in Luc Besson's "The Professional" (aka "Leon," 1994). But Besson is ultimately a sentimentalist who spares Portman's character from doing the lethal work, whereas Vaughn isn't exactly concerned about Hit Girl getting blood on her hands. Or, as the "Kick-Ass" press notes state: "Hit Girl is a sparky, spunky force of nature, likely to be an instant professional icon redolent of Jodie Foster in 'Taxi Driver' and Natalie Portman in 'The Professional.'" (No one from Lionsgate or the film was made available to comment.) "The notion of innocence in this society is gone," said Neal Gabler, author of "Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "It's not just a function of violence. I think it's a function of a certain social cynicism that has just built and built and built over the years where people believe in nothing." Which isn't to say violence doesn't play a role. "There was kind of a firewall between kids and violence, and that firewall is completely gone now," Gabler said. "Kids sit around and kill people on video games." And if the finger-waggers come out against "Kick-Ass," then the movie essentially has done its job. "If you're making this movie, you want people to disapprove because popular culture has always been a form of rebellion," Gabler said. "One of the reasons American popular culture is so 'trashy' is not because everybody is stupid; it's because people love the idea of challenging official culture." Yet don't assume that the reactions to Hit Girl will be anything close to universal. Melissa Silverstein, who writes the feminist blog Women and Hollywood (womenandhollywood.com), saw an advance screening of "Kick-Ass" and said she was surprised by how torn she felt. "It was disturbing, but I was also empowered in the same moment, and that doesn't happen very often," Silverstein said. "It just kind of flew into the face of all expectations of how girls act on screen, and that's what was so exciting and breathtaking. I couldn't help but feel some semblance of excitement as a person who's watched male comic book characters save the day time and time again." At the same time, though, she was "ambivalent about someone who just kills people for the sake of killing," and the casual use of a certain very vulgar anti-female epithet bothered her. "I saw all the boys sitting around me loving that, and they loved it a little too much." Given that one of the movie's teen boys is so wowed by Hit Girl that he declares he'll wait for her to come of age, male reactions to this prepubescent character could represent another can o' worms. Silverstein didn't think her portrayal ever became "icky" in a "Lolita" kind of way. Still, the image here of a young heroine certainly differs from earlier times. "For prepubescent guys you have to create a different kind of love object in this cynical and far less innocent kind of world," Gabler said. "How do you design a Shirley Temple for this era?" Step one: Give her a gun. Mark Caro: mc...@tribune.com
