Great Character: Hit Girl (“Kick-Ass”)
This month’s theme: Sidekick. Today: Guest poster Jason Cuthbert looks at Hit Girl from the 2010 movie Kick-Ass, screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, comic book by Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.
Not every comic book super hero is a byproduct of the lucrative illustrative history of DC Comics or the expansive Marvel universe. As a matter of fact, the movie rights to the 2010 action comedy Kick-Ass were acquired before the first issue of the Kick-Ass comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. were even issued.
Kick-Ass director and co-screenwriter Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) has since continued with his comic book instincts by co-writing and directing X-Men: First Class (2011) and sharing a story credit on X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) with Simon Kinberg (X-Men: The Last Stand) and Vaughn’s Kick-Ass screenwriting partner Jane Goldman.
But in the Kick-Ass world of homemade vigilante super heroes, such as the film’s high school student crime fighting namesake “Kick-Ass,” it was arguably the 11-year old sidekick heroine Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) that stands front and center, upstaging her older do-gooders with her unexpected viciousness.
Kick-Ass from IMDB:
Dave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan who one day decides to become a super-hero, even though he has no powers, training or meaningful reason to do so.
Chloë Grace Moretz (500 Days of Summer, Hugo) has made quite an early impression by playing perky, spunky young ladies who are perfectly content telling you exactly what is zipping through their mature minds, and Hit Girl is no different. Even as Hit Girl’s alter-ego Mindy Macready, daughter to the disturbingly well armed Batman-ish body suit-wearing crime stopper Big Daddy, Moretz expresses the eager-to-please antics of a youngster trained to play with bullet-proof vests instead of Barbie dolls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uQOkA8zuMk
Hit Girl takes every typical Western World stereotype that you can attach to an 11-year old girl (“passiveness,” “constantly giggling,” “puppy dog pets,”) and lunges a great big samurai sword through each and everyone one these expectations. Hit Girl is not afraid of physical confrontation or typically traumatic environments, and she’d rather score a pair of deadly blades for her birthday then anything remotely close to a poodle.
HIT GIRL: I never play.
If you are pre-programmed to only anticipate naive phrases popping out of the mouths of pre-teens, Hit Girl’s harsh dialogue is a wake up call that may never let you go back to sleep again.
HIT GIRL: Okay, you cunts… Let’s see what you can do now!
Hit Girl’s wordplay and hostile behavior patterns are written to take liberties with our preconceived notions of tame, ladylike heroines, while driving a million watts of surging unpredictability into this purple-haired, plaid skirt keaster kicker. Not only is Hit Girl the resourceful sidekick to her poppa Big Daddy, but she also evolves into a defacto comrade to Kick-Ass, as his wet suit and Timberlands get him in over his head and often losing the wind under his feet.
KICK-ASS: How do I get ahold of you?
HIT GIRL: You just contact the mayor’s office. He has a special signal that he shines in the sky. It’s in the shape of a giant cock.
Co-screenwriter Jane Goldman insightfully describes Hit Girl:
“We just really wanted Hit-Girl to be a character who, in a sense, simply happens to be an eleven-year-old girl, in the same way that Ripley in Alien could have been a guy but the part happened to be played by Sigourney Weaver.”
Due to being raised with four older brothers, super young Chloë Grace Moretz claimed that her character’s uncharacteristically intense verbs, nouns and adjectives didn’t shock her during production. Moretz’s mother even read the Kick-Ass screenplay beforehand and permitted her daughter to partake in the profanity as written. This unshaken comfort that Chloë Grace Moretz has during her Hit Girl performance makes the gravity of her character’s insulated homeschooled warrior training believable, along with these visceral violent reactions being amped up by the loss of her mother. Moretz also performed the majority of her own physical stunts, after three months of tutelage from the stunt crew of martial artist Jackie Chan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va6oQ_2-jh8
For her zany tenacity, her comfort even when others are uncomfortable, and for the personification of a broken heart that has morphed into a hardened artery that doesn’t pump Kool-Aid in the face of danger — Hit Girl is one seriously GREAT CHARACTER.
Her potty mouth alone makes Hit Girl a memorable character. And interesting that screenwriter Goldman made an association with Ripley from the Alien movie series.
Thank you, Jason, for this post. Please join us in comments to discuss Kick-Ass.
You may follow Jason on Twitter: @A2Jason.
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