"Kick-Ass" kicks off 2010's big-screen comic book adaptations. And while the bloody movie, starring Nicolas Cage, doesn't have the name recognition of an "Iron Man 2" or a "Green Hornet" (both arriving later in the year), "Kick-Ass" is attracting serious critical and fan buzz for its eye-popping visual style, its lighthearted badassery (if there can be such a thing) and the breakout work of young Chloe Moretz as the purple-wigged butt-buster, Hit Girl.
As well it should. The flick is a purely fun sugar buzz of a cinematic experience — that is, if you don't mind wicked amounts of bloodshed and the sight of an 11-year-old disemboweling bad guys and getting her face smashed in a few times. As our own Kurt Loder writes in his review, "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."
Of course, not everyone is so amused by the violence and the tweaking of familiar comic book tropes (the story line follows a groups of ordinary New Yorkers who decide to become superpower-free superheroes). Count The Boston Globe 's Ty Burr among the less-than-pleased. "[Director] Matthew Vaughn and company keep cranking up the old ultra-violence and weaponry — the film eventually breaks out a bazooka with a joy that can only be called orgasmic — and at some point it becomes exactly the big, boneheaded movie it was making fun of in the first place," he writes.
Perhaps it's a little much to expect everyone to embrace the "Kick-Ass" vision, but for the fanboys and fangirls the film most clearly has in its sights, "Kick-Ass" has scored a direct hit. " 'Kick-Ass' slips into a groove most 'real' comic book movies can only dream of," writes Jordan Hoffman in UGO.com. "Always funny, but never a parody, Matthew Vaughn's adaptation nails each story beat as stakes slowly and deliberately get raised. Some assume 'Kick-Ass' is somehow subversive — if not to the world of comics, then to the world of action-adventure cinema. It isn't. Hearing a tween girl curse or shoot someone directly in the skull isn't that shocking. 'Kick-Ass' is, above anything else, two full hours of great, well-developed fun."
More must be said about this cursing tween, Chloe Moretz, and her father-in-crime, played by Cage. "Chloe Grace Moretz simply owns this movie, deliriously complemented by Nicolas Cage as her doting but dotty dad," says David Germain of The Associated Press. "That's not to take anything away from [star] Aaron Johnson, solid but rather bland by comparison in the title role as a teen who takes on a superhero alter-ego and bumbles out to fight crime — without a trace of the special powers that usually go with the job. It's just that in Cage and Moretz's Batman-and-Robin-style duo, Vaughn and comic-book writer Mark Millar have created one of the sharpest — and certainly most lethal — father-daughter combinations ever to hit the screen."
We'll give David Edelstein of New York magazine the final word: " 'Kick-Ass' is a compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos."
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