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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   537 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

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I was reading through some of The Dreaded Jim's archives, and I saw that he recommended a film called Kick-Ass. So I took a look, and... where has this movie been all my life?

Everything is great. The writing is great. The action is great. The music is great. This is the best Hollywood action movie I have seen since The Matrix.

The film is bold and unapologetic, working hard to earn its R rating; characters get shot, stabbed, crushed, and burned. The dialogue pulls no punches, mixing wit and profanity without ever coming across as overly edgy or performative.

My new waifu, Hit-Girl, is easily the best character in the movie; watching her mow down a hallway full of mooks to the tune of "Bad Reputation" is a delight. And that's after she infiltrates the bad guy's base by dressing up like a loli schoolgirl; I had no idea Americans could be so cultured!

The only problem is that the MC, Kick-Ass, is not nearly as awesome as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, but that's alright; he can be the Ishmael to the latter's Ahab. And, unlike so many spineless MCs, he continually grows as a character; by the end of the film, he has gradudated from using a "gay-looking taser", as Hit-Girl rightly calls it, to dual wielding miniguns while flying on a jetpack.

I just don't understand why Roger Ebert didn't like it.

I vaguely remember that movie! I think I enjoyed it. I remember I loved Nick Cage in it, and somehow his trademark over performance seemed perfectly suited for his role in the film. Maybe I should give it another spin.

Have you ever seen Shoot Em Up? It's fantastic. Has some of the worst written dialog you'll ever hear, and two award winning actors chewing the scenery and giving that terrible dialog all they possibly can. Also does a great job of constantly escalating the action to increasingly outlandish and cartoonish places. It's a delight to see what absurdity they come up with next.

It was probably my favorite action flick up until I saw John Wick, and even then I should probably rewatch them both to really help me decide their ranking.

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