What Roger Ebert thought of the movie adapting Mark Millar's Kick-Ass comic

Slash Film wrote some history of what the late film critic Roger Ebert thought of the movie based on Mark Millar's Kick-Ass comic series:

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert passed in 2013, just as superhero movies had become the dominant obsession of Hollywood. While Ebert obviously didn't get to write about the genre's eventual plateau, he foresaw it in his 3-star, backhanded compliment review of 2012's "The Avengers," writing: "['The Avengers'] provides its fans with exactly what they desire. Whether it is exactly what they deserve is arguable."

If you think that's mean, then know Ebert had much harsher words for another cape flick: Matthew Vaughn's hard-R superhero parody, "Kick-Ass." Adapted from a comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., "Kick-Ass" hit theaters in 2010. The Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn't cemented the superhero boom yet, but Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films were big enough cultural touchstones to make the parody land. [...]

The 13-year old Moretz played a child soldier in a purple wig who curses like a gangster in a Scorsese movie. That drummed up some moral outrage, and Ebert joined the chorus. In his 1-star review of "Kick-Ass," Ebert bemoaned:

"Will I seem hopelessly square if I find 'Kick-Ass' morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? [...] A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere."

Kick-Ass delights in its vulgarity and violence

Ebert was hardly a prude or a moralist. This is the man who called political correctness "the fascism of the '90s" and wielded his pulpit to admire Alice Krige as the seductive Borg Queen in "Star Trek: First Contact." Even so, violence committed by children seems to have been a red line for him.

Well look, there are things Ebert said in his time that I didn't agree with either (and I don't find it impressive if he admired Kridge's role in First Contact because she was "seductive" since the character she played was a villainess), but I don't see critiquing sensationalized violence and vulgarity as a bad thing. There's way too much of that in society now, and it's far from a funny thing. When there's a bad influence going about, a certain amount of objectivity could come in handy for dealing with it. Also brought up here is what else but the Dark Knight Returns:

Now, Hit-Girl is a parody of Robin; Big Daddy's costume in the movie resembles Batman, and Cage does an impression of Adam West. As a crime-fighting little girl, Mindy is especially similar to Robin/Carrie Kelley from Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns." That book revealed the second Robin, Jason Todd, had died in the line of duty, showing what's most likely to happen if you dress a kid up in a leotard and send them out to find gangsters. Miller, though, has maintained he only deconstructed parts of Batman to build him back up better. "Kick-Ass" attempts a similar balancing act, but despite their similar names, Mark Millar (and for that matter, Matthew Vaughn) is no match for Frank Miller at his '80s prime.

While Miller may have had turned out some worthy storylines with his "year one/two" run on Batman in the late 80s, I don't consider DKR one of his best stories, even if it's not his fault for influencing where the editors went the following decade, making Bruce Wayne more cynical and cold than need be. Predictably, the columnist distorts reality and facts by saying DKR "revealed" instead of established, perpetuating a serious problem of talking down to the audience, which, come to think of it, is just what he's doing when it comes to Millar's so-called indie "masterpiece" too.

However, this column does stress exactly what's wrong with writers like Miller: he "deconstructed" the Masked Manhunter, and supposedly tried to rebuild him in what he considered an "improved" structure, and effectively paved the way for more overrated writers like Millar, and even Grant Morrison and J. Michael Straczynski in later years. It's pretty telling when Miller for one can't appreciate the concept of surrealism enough to respect what Bob Kane and Bill Finger set out to do when they introduced Dick Grayson about a year after Bruce Wayne in the Golden Age. If that's what he thought back in 1986 when he first wrote DKR, it's hard to believe he really admired them to begin with, even though without them, it's possible we'd never have the Caped Crusader.

Since the subject of 2nd Robin Jason Todd comes up in the first article, DC in the 80s once had something quite eyebrow raising to bring up in an interview with Jim Starlin, who penned the whole storyline that followed up on DKR, in a manner of speaking, and what happened in the aftermath:

Mark: Is that why, even though you worked on the first few issues of the New Gods spin-off, you weren't on it after a few issues?

Jim: No, that had to do with Batman. For Batman, we did Death in the Family -- which was their best-selling book that year -- but it turns out they had all these licensing (pajamas, lunch boxes, and stuff like that) and the licensing department was very mad, everybody got mad, and they needed somebody to blame -- so I got blamed. And within 3 months all of my work dried up -- in fact Paris Cullins and whoever the new writer was drew up a new first issue that came in ahead of *my* New Gods issues that I had already written. Y'know, everything just sort of fell apart at that point at DC for me, and I went back with Marvel. And it worked out okay because I went over to do Silver Surfer and the Infinity Gauntlet. So I can't complain about that.

That's certainly irony of ironies, I guess. Depending what one thinks of licensing arrangements and merchandise, that's one more reason why it's bizarre they'd go to all that trouble of scapegoating a fictional character for starters (Todd), and then, even though Starlin may have been doing the bidding of the editors and publishers, they still threw him under the bus soon after. With all due respect to Denny O'Neil, one could reasonably wonder why he mattered more than Starlin, since O'Neil was throughly okay with offing Todd to start with, and set a very poor example of projecting and scapegoating fictional characters. Such an approach has caused untold damage to comicdom, and can't continue any longer.

As for Millar's so-called masterpiece in crudeness, Kick-Ass, again, I think it's regrettable how overrated writers like him have made a whole career catering to sleaze, taking it de-facto mainstream, and only dampening morale in sane society. This kind of storytelling is something future writers have to move away from, since it's only making things worse, and doesn't make a good substitute for more optimistic viewpoints.