Trashback: Kick-Ass

Hey Gasmi, do you like comic book movies? Well you better, because those are the only ones they are making right now. Anyway, the really cool thing about superheros are their superpowers. Take that new Ryan Reynolds movie, Green Lantern; his super power is a magic ring. Which when I think about it isn’t really a super power, and actually it sounds kind of dumb.  I guess this would explain that disappointing opening weekend. So I guess super powers aren’t that important in comic book movies. Oh crap, did I just poop on my thesis statement in the first paragraph? Again?

Anyway, our movie today is about superheros who are superpower deficient. Yep, we’re going to spend some time with the 2010 release, Kick-Ass. Come on, lets get to the good stuff.

Our movie starts with two things you can never have too much of in a comic book movie, spandex, and voice-over narration, and both of these things aren’t as odd or annoying as you might first think. The spandex is because without it vigilantism comes across as more death squad then entertainment. And as for the voice over narration, sure the Debbie Downers who run writing programs always yap about “show, don’t tell,” but as any producer who actually knows the cost of shooting and developing film stock knows, “tell like the wind. Our star wants a bigger trailer for his gym.”

Anyway. our movie starts with some guy in a spandex costume trying to fly off the side of this skyscraper. Oh, and we watch him fail miserably as our narrator tells us that this guy just happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic. Some people might think that having a crazy person fail at being a superhero in a movie about a teenager trying to become a super hero might be a bit of a ham fisted metaphor for the 47 second mark of the film, but did any of those people manage to get their moms to fork over money for film school? No? Then lets give the director the benefit of the doubt. At least for his mom’s sake, I mean that’s a shitload of Bingo money we’re talking about here.

With our first act of random violence out of the way, we can get started with the actual movie. Well, mainly what we get is a ton of that voice over narration from our main character, Dave Lizewski. Dave spends most of the first act trying to convince us he is a totally average teenager, or even a little below average.

Going by what Dave tells us, he does seem to be holding up the left side of the bell curve in just about any category that counts in high school. He’s not a brain, doesn’t have much athletic ability, and teenage girls tend to treat Dave, well like a teenage boy who doesn’t have a lot on the ball.

On the credit side of the old account book of life, Dave like comic books, and masturbates like a spider monkey. Both activities are pretty normal for teen age boys, but you can’t really do either one at the school talent show. Well, not if you want to win.

Luckily for the movie Dave is toying with the idea of becoming a super hero. Thank God for that, because you can’t make a successful Hollywood movie about a teenage boy masturbating for two hours. Okay, you can build a website with boo coup traffic on that concept, but not a movie that gets a green band trailer.

Spot the chronic masturbator in this picture (Easiest online quiz ever!)

Dave asks his friends what they think about somebody dressing up and taking it to the street. Dave’s friends think that’s fine for a flash mob, but a great way to get killed if you don’t have any superpowers. I mean besides having a kung fu grip on your doodle at all times. Dave’s friends are the voice of reason, which means they hate the plot of this movie, so we don’t feel bad that Dave ignores them.

Actually there is a line in the sand moment that comes right after this. Dave and one of his buddies get mugged. Well not only do they get mugged, but they get mugged by guys who mug them all the time. And just to put a cherry on top of this sundae of a moment, Dave sees some guy seeing the whole thing from his apartment, but closing the drapes so he doesn’t have to get involved.

That does it. Dave is fired up. Dave is ready to take back the streets of New York, and does what all real men would do in this situation. He goes online and orders a wetsuit, a ski mask, and a night stick. You know, Dave’s version of taking back the streets is only a set of edible panties and a wienie-bikini away from also being able to spice up a 10th wedding anniversary.

So Dave is going to get out there and start kicking street tough butt, right? Whoa, slow down there cowboy. You can’t become a superhero without a lot of super serious superhero training. Or in Dave’s case, semi-serious training. Okay, actually he just puts on his costume and spazzes out in front of the mirror in his bedroom, but I’m sure we’ve all been in training programs that we wished were as useful as dressing up and spazzing out in front of a mirror.

This is still more useful then any powerpoint presentation I’ve ever sat through

Granted, Dave is not being very superheroish right about now, but not to worry because Nicolas Cage is shooting small girls with a handgun. Okay, that last sentence wasn’t really true, because actually Nicolas Cage is just shooting his daughter. Quit making that face, his daughter is wearing a bulletproof vest.

Nicolas Cage wouldn’t do anything crazy. I mean it’s not like the guy would go out and buy two castles in Europe in a six month period…What? REALLY? Well that’s not helping my argument.

Okay, sure, Nicolas Cage is shooting his daughter, but she seems to be prefectly normal. Well I mean aside dropping f-bombs over hot fudge sundaes and asking for a butterfly knife for her birthday. All 12-year-old girls do that, right? Note to self, buy new deadlock for front door and never turn back to Girl Scouts.

We cut back to Dave who is now wearing his wetsuit under his clothes and ready to go out and start fighting crime. In a neat bit of symmetry Dave just happens to run into the same guys who mugged him earlier.

Dave suits up and tells those two evil-doers knock it off. The street toughs burst out laughing, because Dave looks like a total dork. Well Dave may be a dork, but he’s a dork with a nightstick. Taste the righteous lumber of justice evildoers!

Dave gets a couple of good licks in with his nightstick, and then reality kicks in, and the other street tough pulls out a knife and stabs Dave.

Dave then stops concentrating on crime fighting so he can devote his whole attention to pumping blood through that brand new hole in his body. The street toughs take off, because they seem pretty embarrassed to have even been involved in this little shindig. This is fine because Dave has decided to stagger around in circles in the middle of the street.

This is why Dave gets hit by a car. A car that just happens to be driven by the guy who saw him get mugged and didn’t get involved. The guy stops his car, notices that nobody has seen him pull a frogger on a pedestrian. Then the guy pulls a Halle Berry and drives away. That’s the last we see of that guy in the movie, but don’t worry, because I’m sure karma will catch up with him. Just not karma in the form of a court appearance or higher insurance rates.

Eventually the EMT’s show up, and Dave gets carted off to the hospital where he spends the next couple of months, but we don’t have to watch that part because of the aforementioned cost of film stock. We just find out that the doctors had to put a bunch of titanium rods in Dave’s body, and that Dave has some slight nerve damage that means he can take more of a beating then before he got stabbed and run over. Oh, and we find out that Dave got the EMT’s not to tell people that they found him in his wetsuit, so nobody knows about Dave’s crime fighting career.

That last plot element pays immediate dividends as soon as Dave gets back to high school. This girl, Katie, who just happens to be the most pretty and popular girl in school, and who Dave has always had a crush on, suddenly wants to be friends.

Dave is pretty jazzed by this, so his friends just have to point out that Katie only wants to be friends because she feels sorry for him because she thinks he’s gay. Huh, what, who? Yeah, the story going around school is that Dave was naked when the EMT’s found him, so he’s gay. Okay if this doesn’t make sense to you either, welcome to the club. It seems the internal logic of this movie can be summed up in the following equation:

Stabbed + Run over by a car + being found naked = So gay you shit glitter.

Anyway Dave gets to hang out with his crush, so we go with it.

The good news for the actual plot of the movie is that Dave hasn’t given up on crime fighting. He does 20 situps, buys a new wetsuit and hits the street again.

Dave does decide that maybe this time he he won’t go after big crimes like grnad theft auto, and starts a little bit smaller. He looks for a missing cat. What? Looking for a missing pet is the amuse bouche of crime fighting.

Dave wanders around for awhile until he sees the cat up on a billboard. Dave crawls up the sign, but ends up falling off it, and right on to this guy who was being chased by some completely different street toughs then the guys who stabbed Dave earlier.

Dave defends the guy he fell on and pulls out not one, but two night sticks. As Dave fights the street toughs, he sees a guy watching the fight and tells him to call the police. The guy runs into a coffee shop and tells everyone else there is a big fight outside, “and it’s AWESOME!”

Everyone in the shop runs to the window so they can record the fight with their cellphones. Okay, that’s not the response Dave was looking for, but nobody runs him over with their cars either. Sometimes we have to settle for baby steps people.

Eventually one of the street toughs pulls a knife, but Dave makes an impassioned speech about right and wrong and the guy takes off. He also noticed all those people filming him, and he could hear the police sirens in the distance, but screw it, a win’s a win. Then one of the guy’s who was filming the fight comes out and asks Dave who he is and Dave tells him he’s Kick-Ass, and at the 34 minute mark we finally get the title into the movie.

Some of the clips of Dave fighting get posted on YouTube and Kick-Ass becomes an internet sensation. Not only that, but Kick-Ass ends up with 16,000 friends on his MySpace page. [Please insert your own cheap joke about not knowing MySpace having 16,000 members here]

And not only are things going well on the superhero front, but he and Katie are really starting to get along too. Okay, she thinks he can tell which pair of ear rings will go with her belt, but it’s a start, right?

And things get even better for Dave, because Katie has a problem. It turns out that Katie works at a needle exchange program. Yes, not only does Katie befriend young gays who been stabbed and run over, but she also volunteers at a needle exchange program. She’s kind of like Jesus, only with way more perkier boobs.

My new gay bestie’s pants keep poking me

Anyway, Katie met this guy at the needle exchange program and lent him some money, and got kind of chummy with him, but it turns out that the guy, Razul, is kind of a jerk and Katie wishes somebody like Kick-Ass would get Razul to leave her alone.

Dave immediate suits up and heads over to take care of this problem, because how hard could it be to scare a guy who just happens to have the sort of name that you’d expect for one of Sauron’s lieutenants?

Luckily for the plot it’s a lot harder then Dave has thought it would be. It turns out that Razul is roughly twice as big as Dave, and he has several friends who are more Razul’s size then Dave’s size. Oh, and Katie is kind of out of the loop, because not only does Razul use drugs, he seems to sell them too. (Yep, it’s a classic Amway situation)

Now when Dave is confronted by this instead of responding the way a whiny recapper, sorry, intelligent mature American man, would respond, by piddling in fear and screaming like a girl as he ran for the door, Dave doubles down on having this situation end badly by telling Razul he will kick his ass if he doesn’t leave Katie alone. I think we can all agree Dave is a really nice guy, but the boy has the survival skills of a depressed lemming.

Razul gets ready to open up the whoop-ass can on Dave, and ZOT! Dave stuns Razul with a Taser, and I begin to giggle. You see I am a product of my upbringing. This means that because Sesame Street didn’t exist when I was a young child, people thought that The Three Stooges were perfectly acceptable child TV programming for four-year-olds. Thanks to this I find the concept of electrocution to be fairly hilarious. This may also be why whenever I see one grown man attempt to cram an entire crowbar into another man’s ear I laugh until I pee. Sorry, I’m not talking about the movie again, am I?

Anyway, Razul’s buddies grab Dave, and we can add being a poor sport to Razul’s list of character flaws, because he grabs a knife and gets ready to get all stabbity.

That is right up until a great big steel blade bursts through Razul’s chest, and then he gets to work on his onscreen dying skills. When Razul collapses we see who killed him, and it’s a little girl?

Yep, a pre-teenage girl in a purple wig, mask and wearing a costume that is half bad-ass urban warrior, and half-school girl uniform is standing there with a double-headed spear roughly the same size as her. This is bad news for all the goons in the room, because in the immortal words of Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live; she has come to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and she is all out of bubble gum.

Oh my friends, the whoop-ass can is indeed opened, but sadly for the goons it is a little girl who is doing the opening. As a punk version of the Theme to the Banana Splits plays in the background this small child goes completely ginzu on our very surprised mooks.

The best part of the fight is that every time the little girl unleashes some hellacious move on a goon she looks over at Dave and smiles as if to say “isn’t this the most fun you could ever have?” Dave responds by looking at her like he is the process of shattering the land speed record for completely voiding the contents of his GI tract into his wetsuit. (In fact, Aaron Johnson is so convincing that I am tempted to from now on to refer to anyone in a movie looking like they are crapping their pants in fear as “pulling an Aaron Johnson.”)

Anyway, the little girl kills all the bad guys. Well most of the bad guys, Nicolas Cage kills this one big boned goon who was sneaking up on the little girl.

Oh, and did I mention that Nicolas Cage was dressed like Batman while he was doing it? No. Nicolas Cage is not crazy. It’s not like the guy couldn’t make a marriage with Lisa Marie Presley last as long as the King of Pop. What? Really? Well that’s…odd.

The little girl gathers up all of Razul’s drugs and money runs up to the roof so she can jump across the ally and hook up with Nicholas Cage who is on a billboard, but first she looks back and tells us the answer to the question we all want to know. She say, “Me? I’m Hit-Girl.”

Just so you know right now, as far as this waffleboy is concerned this little girl was the most bad-ass character in movies in 2010, and she did it without breaking a sweat.

Someone who is leaking bad-ass votes all over the place is Dave. Dave goes home curls up on his bed in the fetal position and whines to us in voice over narration about how meeting Hit-Girl made him realize that he isn’t a real superhero.

Okay so we got a teenage boy sniveling about his poor self-image, while at the same time a small girl is taking down drug gangs. Our society is either failing miserably, or succeeding beyond my wildest dreams; you choose, I can’t decide.

Anyway, Dave gets woken up in the middle of the night and freaks out because Hit-Girl and Nicolas Cage are in his bedroom. Nicolas Cage is talking like Adam West on the Batman TV show, but I think we can all agree this is probably as sane as Nicky is going to get in the next couple of hours.

Nicholas Cage and Hit-Girl have stopped by to point all of the ways that Dave’s superhero career could be traced back to him. Luckily for the plot (and this will come in very handy in a few paragraphs), Nicolas Cage and Hit-Girl cover all of Dave’s tracks.

Fun fact, Nicolas Cage is wearing a bullet-proof pillow as part of his costume

Dave tells them thanks and also that he is thinking of giving up being a superhero, because he’s in a little over his head. I got the impression that Nicolas Cage thought Dave was a wussie when he heard this news, but they give Dave a way to get in touch with him if the screenwriter needs to insert a major plot point into the movie. Whoops, I mean if Dave is ever in trouble and needs their help.

Okay, we are going to cut away from Dave for awhile and spend some time with Nicolas Cage and Hit-Girl, mainly because we get to find out about their back story, but also because if Dave feels any more sorry for himself this will officially become an adaption of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret.

Actually we get our next dose of exposition pretty painlessly thanks to a magical black man called Marcus. Marcus comes over to Nicolas Cage’s apartment and lets himself in. It’s okay because Marcus is a policeman. Unless you’re a fan of the 4th Amendment, then it’s seriously creepy.

Marcus isn’t fazed by the fact that Nicolas Cage has enough firepower sitting on his walls to start World War III, what has Marcus’s attention are some comics on the table. Hmm, it looks like Marcus is an art cop.

The comics are super handy for us because they tell us the story of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy (that’s Nicolas Cage’s super hero name. What? No,it’s not also his porn name. At least I pray it’s not.)

It turns out that Nicolas Cage was like a super cop, but the local crime boss framed him for drugs, and Nicolas Cage got sent to prison. While he was there his pregnant wife committed suicide, but the doctors were able to save her baby daughter, Mindy. Mindy goes to live with Marcus, because he’s Nicolas Cage’s old partner, and best friend, so he provides child care and reasons for spewing exposition at the audience whenever Nicky gets in a jam.

Nicolas Cage spends five years in prison, and when he gets out he starts training Mindy, so she can help him take down the crime boss. And, no, I have no idea why Nicolas Cage thought the best person to help him take down a crime boss would be a child, but I know he’s not crazy.

I mean it’s not Nicolas Cage ever went to New Orleans and got so loopy he couldn’t remember where he left his house, and then insisted someone call the police to help him find it, and when he got arrested,he was then bailed out of jail by Dog the bounty hunter. What? Oh, now he’s just f@#king with me.

Anyway, Marcus doesn’t think turning a small girl into a killing machine is good parenting. You think so Marcus? Way to take a stand Doctor Spock. Still for the good of the plot he doesn’t try to stop Nicolas Cage. He just tells Nicolas Cage to be careful and wanders out of the shot.

Hey, speaking of that crime boss, he’s in the movie too, and lets look in on him right now. Okay, while I’ve been telling you all about Dave, Hit-Girl, and Nicolas Cage, our crime boss and his friends have been in the movie too. I just haven’t talked about him up until now to streamline this recap. Seeing as we are only about half way through the recap and we are at about the 3,500 word mark, I’ve failed miserably.

Here’s whats been going on with the crime boss while we have been talking about other stuff. Somebody has been killing his people and stealing his drugs. Now we know that those somebody’s are Hit-Girl and Nicolas Cage, but the crime boss doesn’t know that.

In fact thanks to a blurry camera phone picture from Razul’s the crime boss thinks Dave is the somebody. The crime boss tries to hunt Dave down, but thanks to Nicolas Cage and hit girl covering his tracks, the crime boss hasn’t found dick so far.

This has made the crime boss so cranky he has taken to killing birthday performers and doing blow. Trust me, watch the movie and that last sentence will make a lot more sense.

Luckily for the plot, the crime boss has a son named Chris, and taking a page from the Tony Danza Big Book of Acting (only play characters with the same first name as you) Chris is played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, but I think Bill Hader spoke for all of us in Superbad when he said, “Fuck that, we’re calling you McLovin!”

So McLovin the crime boss’s son, and he has been very anxious to get into the family business. The crime boss hasn’t been too keen to put this idea into action because McLovin is only 17, and if you were a fictional crime kingpen would you really want to get involved in an ongoing criminal enterprise with someone whose driver license says they’re a 25-year-old organ doner from Hawaii?

Still, McLovin says he has a plan, and seeing as killing child entertainers hasn’t been working out, the crime boss has no choice but to give it a chance.

We cut over to Dave hanging out with his friends and Kristie when it comes on the TV that there is a new superhero in town, McLovin. Okay, they don’t call him McLovin, his superhero name is Red Mist, but it’s McLovin.

Dave finds himself getting a little jealous of Red Mist, especially when Katie casually mentions she thinks Red Mist’s cape is kind of hot. Of course things get interesting when Dave gets home and checks Kick-Ass’s MySpace page and finds out that Red Mist wants to meet.

So, for the good of the plot, we get a Kick-Ass/Red Mist summit. McLovin totally butters Dave up by saying how Kick-Ass is his hero and he would totally want to be his sidekick. Well this is all good news to Dave, and when McLovin suggests that they go out and fight some crime he really can’t politely turn him down.

McLovin managed to get a totally cool car from his dad for his plan, so he and Dave get to tool around town and almost look cool for a change. Actually Dave and McLovin get along pretty good, and have a lot in common, and we could say that this is a classic comic book theme where the heroes and villains could probably be friends in a different world, but we are going to try to avoid being that pretentious. and kind of fail.

Anyway, all of the sudden the poop hits the fan when they get to this hardware store that is going up in flames. Now this particular hardware store just happens to be owned by the crime boss, and all of his goons were waiting there to jump Kick-Ass, which was all part of McLovin’s plan.

McLovin freaks out and goes running in the building, because all the people inside are his friends. Well, they used to be his friends, because when McLovin goes inside he finds that they are all dead. McLovin then starts running through the flames until he finds what he is looking for, a teddy bear?

While McLovin was doing that, Dave went into the building and immediately realized it was a bad idea. Dave wanders around in the flames, pretty much just waiting to be incinerated, until he hooks up with McLovin and they just barely escape the building.

Our doofuses split up, McLovin finally gets home and we get to see why he almost got killed trying to save a teddy bear from a burning building. It turns out that that teddy bear was actually a nanny cam. McLovin wanted to post them unmasking Kick-Ass on YouTube, so they get to see who opened the whoop-ass can on their goons.

We then get to Nicolas Cage kick serious goon butt while dressed like Batman, and at this point in the movie that doesn’t faze us one bit. The bad news for the bad guys is they have no idea who this guy is, but the good news is that Dave mentioned to McLovin that they weren’t the only superheroes in town, so if McLovin can get Dave to hook them up with Nicolas Cage, then evil will finally triumph over good.

We cut from that back to Dave, and he has made a very important decision. He’s going to get laid. He’s going to tel Katie he isn’t gay, and let nature take its course.

Dave is also going to do this while dressed as Kick-Ass, and he is going to sneak into Katie’s room through her open window. So it’s only surprising to Dave that she freaks out, sprays his eyes with hair spray, and starts wailing on him with a tennis racket.

Eventually her arm gets tired, and Dave is able to convince Katie that he is good gay friend Dave. Who isn’t gay, and has always loved her, oh and he’s also Kick-Ass. Katie takes all this in and realizes that when Dave was helping her self tan and rubbing his hands all over her body that wasn’t a fresh pack of wintergreen Lifesavers in his tidy whities .

So naturally Katie decides that she and Dave should have sex. If you live anywhere in a 10 mile radius of me, I apologize for loudly swearing and throwing my remote control at the TV every time I have to watch this scene. Look, I’m not saying that I couldn’t eventually see Katie getting together with Dave, but immediately wanting to do the hoochie cootchie with somebody who has not only been lying to you for a few months, but who showed up in your room wearing a ski mask and big yellow work gloves does to the suspension of disbelief what Dave does to Katie off camera.

This picture has nothing to do with this part of the movie, I just like it

Moving on, so Dave and Katie hook up, and Dave tells us that he has finally found a reason to live. This by the way is the classiest way of saying I’m regularly banging the hottest girl in school on a dumpster behind the comic book store this waffleboy has seen in a long, long time.

Dave decides he is through with being a superhero, and good for him, but we don’t make two act movies. This is why Dave suits up as Kick-Ass one more time when McLovin bombards him with e-mails telling him they need to meet right away.

McLovin tels Dave that there are some scary bad dudes after them, and they need the help from some people who’s super powers extend beyond taking a beating and over-caring about stuffed animals. Dave sends a message to Nicolas Cage and Hit-Girl, and he and McLovin get an invite to Casa de Comic Book.

When Dave and McLovin get over to Nicolas Cage’s apartment McLovin proceeds to shit all over the Emily Post Guidebook of Etiquette, when he shoots Hit-Girl within three steps of clearing the front door. Hit-Girl tumbles out of the window as a bunch of the crime boss’s goons storm in and put the snatch on Nicolas Cage and Dave.

Also, one of the goons takes the bazooka that was on Nicolas Cage’s wall, because as he puts it; “I’ve always wanted one.” Welcome to the club crime boss’s goon. I’ve had one on my wish list for years. (By the way, Dear Santa, no pony or a bazooka last year? Eat me fat man.)

The goons take Nicolas Cage and Dave to a warehouse, so they can torture and them kill on the interwebs to nip this whole superhero thing in the bud.

McLovin is kind of upset, because Dave’s going to get killed, and he’s the closest thing McLovin has had for a friend in this entire movie. Crime Boss explains that people know about Kick-Ass, but nobody’s heard of Nicolas Cage, so it’s nothing personal, but they need a little name recognition to pull in the eyeballs.

Be quiet for the rest of Monday Night Football, and maybe, Just Maybe, we won’t send you to Camp Pray The Gay Away this summer

The goons proceed to kick the ever loving crap out of Nicolas Cage and Dave, and are about to set them both on fire when the goon with the lighter gets shot, and then the power goes out.

We then switch to the point of view of somebody looking through night vision goggles. Someone who seems to be very short. Yep, Hit-Girl is in the warehouse, and we find out she isn’t a very good sport when it comes to kidnapping and torturing Nicolas Cage.

Hit-Girl kills a bunch of mooks in a number of entertaining ways, but one of the goons is still able to set Nicolas Cage on fire. Nicolas Cage then begins shrieking in a very high pitched voice. This is probably because he is going up like a Roman candle. Then again he talked this way all the way through Peggy Sue Got Married, and we only wished someone would set him on fire. Quit making that face. I know I wasn’t the only one thinking that.

Hit-Girl kills the rest of the mooks, and gets her dad put out. Hit-Girl and Nicolas Cage then have a pretty touching scene even though Nicolas Cage is still talking funny. Nicolas Cage shuffles off this mortal coil, and then Dave and Hit-Girl exit stage right.

Things look pretty grim right now, but not to worry, because Dave has a plan. Show of hands, how many of you knew it rhymes with dwiting? Luckily for the plot Hit-Girl tells Dave to sack up, loads up a suitcase with a mess of weapons, and heads off to give this movie the kind of finale it deserves.

Over at the crime boss’s building this guy who was in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and who for a reason we are never made clear of is dressed as a doorman wants to know why this extra won’t let a little girl in pigtails who has a suitcase with her into the building in the middle of the night. My guess would be because the extra can hear the Sergio Leone music playing in the background.

The doorman guy lets Mindy (Hit-Girl) into the building, and Mindy gives them an extra helping of a little girl who has lost her mommy and daddy. Doorman Guy bends over and lets her use his cell phone, and after a while the three other goons notice he hasn’t stood up.

The camera slowly pans around the guy, and we see that Hit-Girl has pushed the barrel of a silenced pistol into his mouth. The goons go for their guns, but pop, pop, pop. Hit-Girl drops them like clay pigeons. Oh, and as Hit-Girl is walking away she shoots Doorman Guy in the head. Bad. Ass.

Hit-Girl gets ready to ride the elevator up to the floor where the crime boss is, and we have to cut back to Dave. Dave takes this time to remind us what a poser he’s been, and how sooner or later everyone has to stand up and make a difference. Blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Jesus Dave, we’re in the last 10 minutes of the movie, less talkie more killie.

Luckily for the audience, Hit-Girl isn’t a Chatty-Kathy like Dave. She comes out of that elevator wearing her costume and takes down four goons with a knife on a string. The only thing is she makes the last goon shoot himself, so all the bad guys now know she’s there.

Now we come to the scene. Pretty much all current action movies, especially action movies with female characters have this scene.  A long hallway filled with goons that the action hero goes through like poop through a goose.

There is even a checklist you can use for successful hallway scenes, so lets see how this scene does. A hallway scene should always have either heavy metal, or punk playing in the background. This scene has a rousing version of Bad Reputation, check. A good hallway scene always has what can be at best called a contemptible relationship with physics. Hit-Girl jerks her head to dodge bullets, check. In a successful hallway scene the character will do coll things with their weapon, engage in acrobatics that would give Mary Lou Retton a charlie horse, and kill the goons in a variety of grisly yet highly entertaining ways, check, check, hell yeah check! So I guess we can mark this down as a successful textbook hallway scene.

Oh, and if I have given the impression to you that I am in someway too cool to appreciate this scene, let me apologize for misleading you. I love this scene, and I’m not just talking enjoy watching it over and over. I want to nuture and care for this scene like a child. Hell, I want to send it to college, and not some shit state school where all the scene will learn is how to do a keg stand and how long it takes an antibiotic to take care of a dose of chlamydia. I’m talking a good private school that will leave the scene with student loan debts that will take decades to pay off. What? Education is very important.

So Hit-Girl kills a mess of goons, but she runs out of bullets and some more mooks show up. This leads to Hit-Girl hiding in the kitchen. The mooks send the smalest and most weasel-like of them to spray the room with machine gun fire. Die kitchen island, die!

Weasel Guy kills a lot of pots and pans, and then Hit-Girl kills him with three knifes. This leads to a big black goon saying the magiv words we all want to hear. “F@#k this, I’m getting the bazooka!” Think of how much better The Back Swan would have been with those six sweet little words.

So the big black goon is about to kill Hit-Girl with a bazooka, when we suddenly start to hear Elvis singing The Battle Hymn of The Republic. Dave shows up and not only has a jet pack, but it’s a jet pack with two mini-Gatling guns mounted on it.

By the way, if you want to describe this event please be advised that the only words our judges will accept are “FUCK” and “Yeah.”

The big black goon sees Dave, and makes an Aaron Johnson face right before Dave shoots him and the other goons about a jillion times.

Hit-Girl doesn’t thank Dave, because she’s a girl on a mission. She runs into the room where the crime boss and McLovin are hiding and they all sneer at each other for awhile.

Dave shows up, and he and McLovin have to go fight in the other room, because this one is reserved for bad asses. Hit-Girl and the crime boss share a little witty banter and then start kung fuing the crap out of each other.

Dave and McLovin are also fighting. Well they are clumsily whacking each other with sticks, and eventually they knock each other  out.

We cut back to Hit-Girl and the crime boss, and Hit-Girl is fighting like someone who has been home schooled as an assassin since they stopped using a sippy cup.  She gets in some pretty good licks, but the crime boss knows kung fu too, and he almost twice as big as her.

Eventually the crime boss just body slams Hit-Girl into his desk so hard it makes the desk collapse. Now all he has to do is walk across the room, and pick up a gun and shoot Hit-Girl. If you thought he would be able to do that before Dave was able to wake up from getting knocked out, run down to the room with the dead goons, grab the bazooka, run back, and say something witty before Dave used the bazooka to shoot the crime boss out through the window where the crime boss would explode in a big CGI fireball, you need to know that time management skills suck big time.

McLovin wakes up and grabs a Samurai sword, but Dave has hooked Hit-Girl up to his jet pack harness and they flying off into the sunrise. They fly back to Queens, take off their masks and and shake hands. Cool, and not just because the movie is almost over.

We get a fast little epilogue where we find out Hit-Girl is now living with Marcus and going to Dave’s high school. Dave is still having sex with Katie, but isn’t superheroing any more, because so many people were him and have taken his place. We finish up with McLovin who is still wearing a cape, and bought himself a new hockey mask.  He quotes Jack Nicholson from Batman, and shoots at the camera with a gun. The End.

Well there you have it, not only an awesome movie with great action, but with valuable life lessons.  Lessons like being run over with a car has something to do with the gay lifestyle, lying to teenage girls about your sexuality makes them wet, and Nicolas Cage is fug bucking nuts. You need to see this movie, and if you have seen it, you need to see it again.