I recently saw the movie Kick-Ass, a story about an everyday high-school student who is in over his head when he decides to dress and act like a superhero. Kick-Ass has its fair share of cliché moments, as far as a superhero movies goes, however the movie has enough unique qualities to stand on its own in the superhero universe.
Since I began taking media classes, I have become increasingly aware of camera angles and how every scene of a movie is carefully crafted into the underlying vision. Kick-Ass is a superhero movie and with that comes back flips, guns, and action, all which is filmed at high speeds and is not particularly easy to shoot. However, I left the theater feeling completely entertained and transfixed by how each stunt was perfectly captured and presented for the audience to understand.
The film opens with a man in a costume standing on top of a skyscraper. Both high angle and low angles shots are used to capture both the man jumping off the building and the onlookers from the street. Within the movie the action is slowed down just enough for the audience to grasp what is going on. As the man jumped off the building he did so with finesse, almost appearing as if he would walk away from the fall unscathed.
At times, the film puts on the façade of being inside a comic book. There were transitions from live-action to a comic book drawing of the same shot. It is with these transitions the audience never forgets the main vision of the film: a comic-book movie.
The film encompasses just about every shot talked about in class, including wide-angle, close-up, long shot, panoramic view, tracking shot, etc. Some of my favorite scenes are when the pint-sized super-heroine took on the “bad guys” twice her size. The camera first establishes the location through a very wide shot focusing on all of the villains as well as the set, and then the camera zooms into a close up on the adolescent hero to establish her emotion in what she is going up against. As the action starts the film fluctuates from high-speed to slow motion, either focusing on a high kick or gunshot.
The movie has the main superhero action plot as well as the back-story of a teen boy trying to find his place. Both stories are handled quirkily and with entirely unorthodox methods. Still, the formula of Kick-Ass is the perfect blend of cliché and unconventional, making the movie a pleasant surprise.
