First things first: can it just stop being OK for characters we're supposed to more or less like to use "gay" as an insult all the time? Nice way to turn off an entire row in a movie theater, folks.

The truth is, though, that I kind of loved the movie. It's extremely slickly produced, has really remarkable fight choreography - the best since The Matrix, which I'm just terrified to admit was over a decade ago - and it provoked more thought, challenging me to think about my own nearly-reflexive emotional responses, more than anything else has done in years. The first thing I did when the credits rolled was turn to my boyfriend and say, "I have no idea what I'm supposed to think right now but I loved it and it's horrible and I hate myself for loving it." That cognitive dissonance didn't diminish overnight. In fact, a version of what is basically the first thing I said to him this morning. Subsequent thought over the course of the day has led me to this realization: this movie's biggest problem (and greatest accomplishment) is that it generated rational and emotional responses that are at odds with one another. I want the superheroes of Kick-Ass to win but I don't want anything to do with the means they're ready to use. To break it down, here are my emotional reactions and the rational counterpoints.

Excessive Violence Bad, Make Hulk Angry

And yet I love comics that are awash in violence. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a book about women who are defined by their gift for violence. Batman & Robin is about non-superpowered persons fighting crime hand-to-hand in the streets and has been for decades. The Young Avengers are led by a character who was so eager to join the fray that he was mainlining fake superpowers to get there. Moon Knight? The living avatar of a god of revenge. Punisher, Blackest Night, The Authority, Seige, you name it, it's crazy violent and - from the perspective of the average person in the street - the emphasis there is on crazy. Punisher and Buffy are not exactly similar comics, however, so what's their difference? Motivation and method. I sympathize with the motivations for the heroes in Kick-Ass, up to a point, but their methods go beyond the pale. Intellectually, though, I know that's simply the logical conclusion of the idea of normal people turning to violence to exact revenge: pursued long enough, a violent feud is only over when one side or the other is dead. This is the foundational principle of basically every mob movie ever made and Kick-Ass is, in one of its many aspects, a mob movie. I have to respect the movie for recognizing that some lines can never be uncrossed but I am viscerally uncomfortable with the way the movie makes me think that's awesome.

Holy S&*% That's A Little Kid

...and when I was in college and the short film that evolved into South Park began circulating online I thought it was brilliant because it had little kids calling each other terrible names. I think a lot of people fall into a permanent cognitive dissonance loop just from Hit-Girl alone. If she were nineteen I would think of her as Buffy With Guns and be more or less done with it. Nobody gets this worked up about Hack/Slash but its main character arguably has more in common with Hit-Girl than not. I could see an argument that the biggest difference would be the years on their respective birth certificates. When Hit-Girl drops the f-bomb, or worse, it's like a hot knife right through our presumption of the innocence of youth and that's really distressing. Dial her up past the onset of puberty, though, and it's no big deal. In fact I would probably think it's empowering. It's just creepy to me because she's a little kid.

At Least They Have Each Other

Hit-Girl and Big Daddy have a really refreshingly warm and loving relationship, very open with one another but also playful and protective. There's a lot about them that says, hey, these two may have faced some hardships but they did it together. Really, though, he has twisted her into a murderous robot. How often does he use her name, anyway? He calls her "child" all the time. How am I supposed to think that's a good thing? One step back from their relationship and it looks something like how I imagine the relationships between suicide bombers and their trainers. The movie doesn't seem to be sure it wants me to think they've got a good thing going, either. The film loves to walk that fine line, constantly playing the heroes and the villains as mirror images of one another. That Hit-Girl and Big Daddy love each other doesn't change that they have a life and a relationship as defined by violence as that of their foe and his own progeny or that they aren't both equally capable of considering the violence they do to be laudable and necessary.

Oh, It's Just A Big Dumb Action Movie Anyway, Captain Critical

And it is! And that's part of the problem for me. It's so easy to just follow the program of that sort of movie: the hero has a tragic origin and a consuming quest and I should just root for them and get it over with, right? But this film vacillates between clearly finding that too simplistic and finding that just right. At times it's a mob movie, at others a teen sex comedy, at still others a disturbing tale of how crazy people love each other. I don't know if it was written in committee and emerged as some sort of genre Frankenstein with no conscious effort on its makers' parts or if it consciously and willfully seeks to keep us off-balance as viewers so that we have to wonder why we feel the way we feel from moment to moment.

Ultimately, out of all of these, I'm left right where I started: I loved it and I hate myself for loving it because the movie throws sympathy right out the window from the earliest action scenes, presents me with amoral psychotics as my protagonists and convinces me to root for them even as I feel bad doing so. It keeps threatening to redeem some scrap of humanity and then shows me that glimmer of hope slide back over the ledge, out of sight, again and again.

The boyfriend thinks all this is me trying way too hard and criticizes it as both enjoyably and cynically empty of any sincerity. He thinks the point is to turn off the mind and simply feel excitement from moment to moment and as such the movie is willing to go anywhere and do anything in order to keep the viewer engaged.

When I asked about it at the comics shop this morning, though, I got the now-typical open-mouth-look-at-ground-I-don't-know response and then this observation: "Someone said to me that they think Mark Millar writes great comics for sixteen year olds," and I think that's why I keep getting my brain snagged on the briars of this film. I confess that I think of him as being the guy who ruined The Authority by turning it into something snickering and mean-spirited. In much the same way, even as I enjoyed the really remarkable fight choreography and the wit and the homespun heroism, it's all undercut by a constant aura of grating childish churlishness. It's not entirely unlike the bully who gets off on feigning humanity just long enough to lure someone into lowering their defenses then mocking them for showing a flicker of trust. Kick-Ass wants us to like it but it doesn't think we ought to and it wants to be the first to say so. Sorry, but I think I dated that guy. He was kind of an asshole. That's why I speak of him in the past tense.

But maybe that's its point, y'know?

Even with all that, I still think people should see the movie. I haven't had this much fun liking something and at the same time not liking it in years.