Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a pretty standard nerdy, awkward high schooler. He lives with his recently widowed father (Garrett M. Brown) and his only real friends are the even nerdier Todd (Evan Peters) and Marty (Clark Duke), whom he hangs out with to read comics and surf the web. Dave has the hots for Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca) but to her he's practically invisible. That is, until he gives in to a persistent, curious urge to become like one of the crime-fighters he so avidly reads about. Now, after ordering a green and yellow wetsuit and two batons, he becomes Kick-Ass! Then after building his fighting skills from dreadful to rudimentary, Kick-Ass becomes an Internet hit (pun intended) when he foils an assault at a service station. This broadcast act comes to the attention of seasoned vigilante Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his very obscene young daughter Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), who then track Kick-Ass down to see if he's the real deal. Once Kick-Ass somehow proves himself to them, they team up to go to war against New York City Mafioso Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) and his son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who pretends to be fellow budding crime-fighter Red Mist in an attempt to deceive Kick-Ass. Meanwhile, Dave must also manage to get the girl...
Here we have an action flick that for me reinvented and revitalised superhero films for this decade. An adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.'s comic, Kick-Ass is every fucking bit as forceful, immediate, bold and especially as outrageous as you'd expect from a movie with such a title. But therefore, it's also probably not for anybody on the political right, and certainly not for young'uns. Director Matthew Vaughn, who's since made the two sensational Kingsman movies, and co-writer Jane Goldman take a no-holds-barred approach to this provocative material (so provocative, actually, that esteemed US critic Roger Ebert called it "morally reprehensible") that just makes it impossible to ignore, whatever you think of it. Vaughn's direction also is ferociously well-paced and visually cartoonish for even further unbridled, contagious enthusiasm, and he employs a well-chosen soundtrack. The performances are all fun-filled and natural, with the standout probably being Moretz who instintively gives Hit Girl a surprising but dormant vulnerability alongside all her crime-fighting prowess (and her dropping the C-bomb here made the cinema audience I saw it with gasp loudly; I'll never forget that).
Kick-Ass earned its Australian MA15+ rating the hard way (roughly the equivalent of a US R rating) with some immensely brutal violence and pervasive swearing, but if you have the stomach for it and are weary of the DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes, absolutely try it on for size. Kick-Ass kicks arse.
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