Sitting through "Kick-Ass" is like seeing a Tarantino movie for the first time. Terrible things are happening up onscreen — a musical ear-removal, say, or a nasty basement geek interlude — and yet, somehow, they're breathtakingly funny. Tarantino's discursive tone and giggly humor allow us some distance from the horrors he works up. "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn isn't as jokey as Tarantino — he unapologetically plunges us right into the ultra-bloody mayhem. But this movie's juicy comic-book colors and exuberant fight choreography remove the action from any possible real world and anchor it firmly in the land of fantasy, where no one, of course, ever actually gets hurt.
The movie is wonderful in several ways. Apart from its gasp-inducing hilarity, it marks a welcome return to form for Nicolas Cage, who portrays the hulking vigilante Big Daddy in the halting, campy cadences of Adam West in the old "Batman" TV series. (Who else would have thought of such a thing?) And it features a door-busting breakthrough performance by Chloл Grace Moretz, 11 years old at the time the film was shot, who plays Daddy's little Hit-Girl as a knife-happy mini martial arts avenger capable of reducing a room full of mobsters to moist, dripping sashimi. The movie isn't really about Hit-Girl, but it's Hit-Girl who runs away with the movie.
The story is nominally focused on Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a teenage dweeb who longs to make a difference in the world. Dave's high-school pals laugh when he floats the idea of becoming a superhero, but he goes ahead and buys a cheap green wetsuit for a costume and sets out to fight crime anyway. This doesn't go so well at first — an initial street-thug encounter puts him in the hospital — but he soon gets the hang of it, sort of, and after administering rough justice to another group of bad guys in front of a crowd of cheering teens, he finds himself transformed into a YouTube celebrity, reborn as Kick-Ass. This notoriety brings him to the attention of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl — who have their own crime-busting agenda — and then to the notice of drug lord Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) and his son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), another dweeby kid with his own superhero sideline, as Red Mist (his customized sports car is called the Mist-mobile).
The movie isn't just faithful to the gore-soaked "Kick-Ass" comic-book series by Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr.; in some ways it's an improvement. The film went into production just as the comics began publication, and the picture is more of a collaboration with Millar and Romita than it is a simple adaptation of their work. This allowed Vaughn to tweak the material in beneficial ways, adjusting Big Daddy's backstory to more gratifying effect, and sweetening up a subplot involving a high-school babe named Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), after whom Dave pathetically lusts. (This storyline is still awfully light, but at least it's not as gratingly hostile as in the comics. A dopey jet-pack prop, on the other hand, could've been dropped with no loss to the film.) And presumably Millar was responsible for some of the picture's comic-geek flourishes: Spider-Man creator Steve Ditko gets name-checked at one point, and at another we get a passing glimpse of a movie marquee advertising "The Spirit 3" — a film one hopes will never, ever be made.
The movie advances in a series of beautifully-staged set pieces, the most memorable being a furious Hit-Girl attack on D'Amico's gangster-packed penthouse headquarters. Some of this long sequence was compressed into one of the movie's red-band trailers, but it's even more spectacular in its entirety — a bloody ballet of bullets, butcher knives and even an unexpected bazooka. The violence is fairly horrific (Vaughn had to finance the film himself after every studio he approached passed on it), but it's also, for the most part, explosively funny.
There have been some outraged complaints among critics in Britain, where the film opened a few weeks ago, that Moretz is exploited in this picture in ways that only a pedophile could find appealing. I don't think so. She's not sexualized in any way, and the astonishingly gross epithets she's called upon to deliver are, after all, only words (and coming from such a pint-size character, astonishingly funny ones). Most pertinently, Hit-Girl is not a victim. When Kick-Ass, in the aftermath of a battle that almost went wrong, tenderly inquires about her future prospects, she tells him, "I can take care of myself." After all, she says, "I saved your sorry ass."
Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "The Joneses" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop," also new in theaters this week.
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‘Kick-Ass’: The Reviews Are In!Figure 5 album released this month
