This is certainly an oddly enjoyable film that is skilfully constructed to please a certain type of audience. If you don’t mind laughing at severed limbs, people taking a brutal beating and fathers firing bullets from close range at their daughters, and if you have no problem with an 11-year-old girl coming out with profane language referring to a room full of baddies as c***s before kicking the living bejaysus out of them (go girl); then Kick-Ass is for you.
Kick-Ass is Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr.’s cult comicbook series of the same name. With its tongue firmly placed in its bloodied cheek, the film is an over-the-top raucous twist on the superhero genre. Kick-Ass explores that childish fantasy of becoming a superhero. Most people at some stage threw a blanket around their shoulder and jumped off a bed roaring: ‘I am Blanketman. Look upon me with fear’, before heading off to save the world.
Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is that teenage boy who tries to fulfill this fantasy by donning a green and yellow internet-bought wetsuit that instantly transforms him into Kick-Ass – the crime-fighting vigilante who’s had enough of the scum on the streets. Sadly, Kick-Ass, as an untrained, no-powers-at all vigilante, soon finds himself on the wrong end of a beating, ending up in hospital. Luckily for Kick-Ass, help is at hand – the fearless and highly-trained father/daughter crime-fighting duo, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), who take Kick-Ass under their cape wings and set up a showdown with local mafia druglord, badfella, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong).
Kick-Ass manages to play its over-the top-violence for laughs while at the same time orchestrating some finely choreographed fight scenes. As a result, the film never descends into mere parody and holds its head up proudly as a lovingly created homage. The writing is sharp and the performances are spot on. Nicolas Cage hams it up as Big Daddy (‘Easy! Easy!’ – sadly, not that one. Yet a Shirley Crabtree, Jr. superhero would certainly be a sight to behold), who, upon costuming-up, sports a side-splitting aural homage to Adam West’s staccato delivery in the 1960’s camp crusader, Batman TVseries. But it is Moretz’s Mindy who is the true hero of the piece. Moretz walks away with the film with her performance as the coolest superhero. Her Hit Girl is a fiery concoction of Bruce Lee, a Masyaf assassin and Uma Thurman’s The Bride.
The romantic subplot grates, but hey, every superhero needs a love interest (with the possible exception of Castratoman) and the film could have done with being a bit more compact. However, the high-octane visceral thrills and well observed writing ensures that the world is a better place with Kick-Ass in it.
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