Aaron Taylor-Johnson Was ‘Kick-Ass’ Before ‘Kraven the Hunter’

It has often seemed that subverting superhero conventions has proven impossible to achieve in film in recent memory, mainly because we are still experiencing their golden age for a large part. Sometimes, it is only distance from the genre’s heyday that provides enough clarity to poke fun at it. In the case of Kick-Ass, the superhero craze hadn’t properly taken off before it saw its chance to satirize the men in spandex and the villains laughing maniacally in their evil layers. Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s 2010 film marks a particular time in pop culture and superhero culture, finding a balance between parody and wish fulfillment to mark an underrated flick that takes punches as well as lands them.

Before Matthew Vaughn incited a hate mob with Argylle, he brought his signature blend of tongue-in-cheek hyper-violence and mature story-telling to Kick-Ass, one of the forgotten films of its day. Looking back on it, while not all of it has aged perfectly, there is still a bruising sensibility to it that smartly mocks our fetishization of superheroes as it sends out the titular Kick-Ass on a journey of teenage angst straight out of a Spider-Man comic.

As Taylor-Johnson finally brings us Kraven the Hunter, a lot can be learned about the genre he took part in making fun of nearly 15 years ago. Kick-Ass takes superhero conventions and celebrates them without forgetting to show how unheroic the job can be. What makes Kick-Ass such a good movie? How does it hold up today? Why should fans of this movie be excited about Kraven the Hunter? Here’s what you need to know.

‘Kick-Ass’ Is a Fun Movie With a Dark Side

Kick-Ass starts in the same way it intends to go on, with a wanna-be hero accidentally jumping to his death from a skyscraper. This is mostly what you need to know about the movie, which sees Taylor-Johnson become Kick-Ass, and subsequently get his ass kicked as he tries to fight crime. It’s violent, unforgiving, and a little upsetting at first. Taylor-Johnson plays Kick-Ass with all the naive optimism one would expect. He isn’t even the main hero in his own story. Instead, he follows along with two experienced heroes, one of whom is a little girl, to see what they do.

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Kick-Ass shows us how dangerous the job is and how it can brainwash people into thinking they are the ultimate protectors. At this time, superhero movies were mainly still in their Elektra and X-Men campy phase. Not many movies had shown superheroes from such a realistic perspective at that point. Vaughn brings his style of violence to show how fun it can be, too. It can be hard to tell which side Kick-Ass wants to take. With this, the movie often feels like a snapshot of superhero culture in 2010 rather than a film that stands the test of time from a parody perspective. This is mainly because back then, there weren’t enough good examples of superhero movies to go off of.

‘Kick-Ass’ Is a Very 2010s Movie

Kick-Ass lands somewhere between fetishizing and mocking, which makes for a tone based heavily on the time it came from. It does a lot to separate heroes and non-heroes and places the former on a mythological pedestal that feels like a comic adaptation compared to more modern movies. Kick-Ass starts by peeling away the layers of heroes but eventually gives up on that and drags Kick-Ass over to their side instead of keeping him distant from them in his understanding of what it takes to be one. It all feels a lot like a movie of its time, which isn’t a bad thing. As time has passed and superheroes have become bigger in pop culture, movies haven’t had to worry about showing civilians seeing them as ‘freaks’ or ‘weirdos.’

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Kick-Ass has to deal with that issue, which makes the question of how it has aged more interesting. The film has aged in the same way that many of Vaughn’s films have. He takes a slight grown-up spin on a genre, like with Kingsman: The Secret Service, and lets us into the universe without ever letting us fully understand it. It makes for a very entertaining time, but not one that did anything to crack the code on how to portray heroes and villains going forward.

‘Kick-Ass’ Fans Should Be Excited for ‘Kraven the Hunter’

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a very underrated actor with the charisma to play characters all over the emotional spectrum. The maturity needed for Kraven can be seen in Kick-Ass as the movie progresses. Kraven is the kind of figure Kick-Ass would admire and want to be like, as long as he could help save a cat from a tree instead of murdering people. Kraven is the archetypal macho figure Kick-Ass makes fun of, so seeing him go from one to the other will be interesting for Taylor-Johnson, who has not had many chances to show off his skills as a lead. It also shows how superhero movies have almost gone backward in their self-awareness today.

Not every movie needs to be clever, but Kick-Ass tried to pave the way for smarter methods of showing the bloody realities of heroes, and if Kraven the Hunter is the more generic movie it seems to be, maybe Kick-Ass didn’t do enough. Again, time away from superheroes will be needed if we want to examine the entire genre’s timeline from X-Men and Spider-Man to Captain Marvel and Agatha All Along. The genre has had a strangely bumpy ride when it comes to how eager we are to tell revisionist stories before the craze is fully over. Kick-Ass is an early example of this. It’s a semi-successful attempt at asking what happens after a hero gets punched and how hard the fall can be. Kraven the Hunter is coming to cinemas on December 13.