The beloved movie Roger Ebert despised: “Morally reprehensible”
The profession of the movie critic certainly has its heroes, and only a fool would argue that Roger Ebert was not the cream of the crop. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Time from 1967 throughout the entirety of his career, Ebert infused his writing with an unbridled sense of love for the cinematic medium and an air of humanism.
Through Ebert, his readership learned of the intricacies of movie production and also the themes and motifs that were most important to him as a human being. Cinema is not only entertainment; after all, it’s a medium that can reveal deep truths to us and allow us to understand ourselves better.
Naturally, as a movie critic of the highest order, Ebert never stopped short of dishing out his most damning indictments of the movies he found not to his taste or personal beliefs. Countless films were on the receiving end of Ebert’s most brutal treatment, but few were as low in his eyes as a beloved black comedy superhero movie of 2010.
Ebert found Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass to be one of the worst movies he ever watched. In his review of the film, Ebert wondered whether he should “pretend to be cool” and, therefore, pretend that he actually liked the film that he found to be “morally reprehensible” because of its treatment of children.
Kick-Ass tells of an ordinary teenager, played by Aaron Johnson, who longs to become a real-life superhero. Eventually, young Dave becomes embroiled in the hunt to track down a crime boss, played by Mark Strong, with the help of a former policeman, played by Nicolas Cage, and his eleven-year-old daughter.
Discussing his issue with the film, Ebert noted, “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. Now tell me all about the context.”
Evidently, Ebert found great moral issues with the way that Chloe Grace Moretz’s character was treated in the film, with his seeming to abhor violence against children, even in a satirical context. In addition, the violence that Hit-Girl dishes out was also felt to be egregious by Ebert, who pointed out the affectless quality of the young character despite having several “stone-cold” dead men on the floor around.
“I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what?” Ebert asked. The writer had clearly been worried about young children watching Kick-Ass and learned to have no kind of emotion to acts of barbaric violence. Even though he was ready to admit that the film is a black comedy and, therefore, should be taken with a pinch of salt, he could not forgive the “morally reprehensible” quality of it. Ebert had often detailed his moral outlook in his reviews, and in the instance of Kick-Ass, he was no great fan.
Ebert’s reaction also says something about the kind of critic he was, and why his writing still lands years later. He could be generous, even effusive, but his generosity had limits, and those limits were usually tied to empathy. When a film asked him to laugh at something he considered cruelty, he did not treat that as a clever provocation. He treated it as a moral choice, made by the filmmakers and then passed on to the audience.
That is what makes his closing disappointment feel less like outrage and more like grief. He is not arguing that cinema should be sanitised or tame, but he is insisting that tone does not absolve responsibility. Satire, for him, has to point somewhere, and if the punchline is simply the spectacle itself, then it has failed its own premise. In that sense, his review of Kick-Ass reads like a reminder that being “in on the joke” is not the same thing as being persuaded by it.
Signing off on his thoughts on the film, Ebert wrote, “I reflected that possibly only Nic Cage could seem to shoot a small girl point-blank and make it, well, funny. Say what you will about her character, but Chloe Grace Moretz has presence and appeal. Then the movie moved into dark, dark territory, and I grew sad.”
