The Invisible Counterpoint

Kick-Ass 2 When Roger Ebert reviewed the original Kick - Ass , he wasn't primarily taken aback by any one single incident—Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience having to take a moment to remind themselves about her bullet-proof vest, for instance—but by the fact that people behind the movie were so comfortable exploring a whole terrain of something which had pretty much taken him off stride upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with people dying, being butchered, all over the place, coldly, bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not counting it as beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he writes, "These men, and many others in the film, really are stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?" ...

Cruise really may be the hardest-working man in show business right now, but on him (in direct contrast to James Brown), all that sweat just isn’t cool. Once coolness leaves you, how do you get it back? As big a box-office draw as Cruise may have been in days of yore, he was never truly cool; he has always tried too hard. The more frightening reality, as posed by the ambitious but unsatisfying spy caper Knight and Day, is that he will never, ever go away. (Stephanie Zacharek, “Robotic Tom Cruise Weighs Down Knight and Day,” Movieline, 22 June 2010) Tom Cruise is like Roger Ebert: For awhile (much shorter, of course, with Ebert -- but it did happen with him) we play at making them seem out of date, now sort of ridiculous, but we ultimately decide to keep around, find a set and respected place for, because they still seem more moved by something inside them, self-directed, than just another uber-savy embodiment of our stuck and cranky l'esprit du temps. Cruise is never with ...