Kick-Ass turned out to be the Double Down sandwich of movies!
Both were the objects of lots of speculation right up until they became available for public consumption, at which point it turned out that very few people were actually interested in consuming them. (You could tell Sam Sifton felt really embarrassed about giving in and actually reviewing the sandwich, which is good. He should be embarrassed about it.) Kick-Ass didn’t even make $20 million this weekend, which is also embarrassing, especially since I saw five posters on the way home from work today.
Ebert got morally outraged in his review, and so did A. O. Scott, though less hysterically. But Kick-Ass wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with real humans or real life, so I’m not sure its worth yelling about.
It’s definitely stupid that Kick-Ass exists, though. Don’t these people know that you can’t be interesting anymore by playing with “genre conventions”? The other way of saying this is: don’t they watch Lost? You can’t beat Lost at its own game. Try something else!
I would really like to see a summer blockbuster that didn’t spend its time trying to look culturally smart, because then it would have time to actually be culturally smart. (i.e. I would really like to see summer blockbusters like Independence Day again.)
Ok now I’ll go back to pretending to be excited about Iron Man 2.
