‘Kick-Ass’ And Its Sequel Can Teach Us A Valuable Lesson

Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2 actually have a valuable lesson for us.

Movies like Kick-Ass are notorious for their wanton violence, and most movies like that are really just gore-fests with little educational value. However, these films actually teach you something if you really look closely enough.

Kick-Ass teaches you that every crazy or risky idea you have will have real-life and sometimes violent consequences. Most of the time, these consequences are so severe that you never want to do it again, something the comic books don’t usually tell us.

In the first film, our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) comes up with the idea of actually becoming a real-life super hero. When he gets his costume and batons, he thinks he’s going to clean up the streets all by himself. He even manages to get publicity by taking on some street thugs who clearly give up and let him win, and it gets posted on YouTube and goes viral. However, when he faces the more determined criminal element, he gets messed up and ends up in the hospital.

Real-life ideas have real-life consequences, and Kick-Ass respects that fact. Neither film tries to put a sugar coating on it. By showing the realistic level of violence involved, the movie is actually doing us a favor. It’s telling us we really don’t want to do what Dave is doing.

When Dave Lizewski gets a second chance, he meets his junior partner Mindy Macready (Chloe Grace Moretz), someone who has actually been through what he was dreaming of. She doesn’t take it easy on him at all. Under the hero name Hit-Girl, she shows him there is no glamor to the hero lifestyle, and at that point all he had to do was quit.

Hit-Girl has kept a relatively secret identity through advice from her dad, while Kick-Ass is a bit of an online celebrity, broadcasting his luckiest moments (the parts where he’s not getting beaten up and ultimately saved by real heroes). The mob boss Hit-Girl and her father Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) are after sees his broadcastings and ends up mistaking Kick-Ass for the one taking out his men, and uses his son Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to get revenge.

The sequel gives us the same lesson, plus it throws in the fact that anyone can be a hero if they’re brave and ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Kick-Ass and its sequel teach us that you should always be careful what you wish for, and prepared for the consequences.