This original superhero flick starts superbly, but peters out

Rating: Null/10 (11 June 2010)

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010) is an original, entertaining fusion of teen comedy and superhero movie that stops firing on all cylinders when its guns start blazing. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an ordinary American teenager who decides to become a superhero. He has no powers, aside from "being invisible to girls", but he does have a natty green costume, ordered online. After a spot of posing and some light training, the self-proclaimed Kick-Ass goes into action. Seeing two hoods trying to break into a car, he tackles them - and departs in an ambulance. Eventually, though, through a combination of resilience and dumb luck, our hero does attain local celebrity, along with the unwanted attentions of gangland kingpin Mark Strong, who thinks him responsible for a series of vigilante killings carried out by wronged ex-cop Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his foul-mouthed daughter Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz, who is terrific). Meanwhile, Strong's neglected son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) decides he wants to get involved, and reinvents himself as the bequiffed Red Mist.
The film starts in an appealingly whimsical vein, its superbly-observed passages about teen life punctuated with blasts of graphic, realistic violence: one minute Lizewski is wrestling with love interest's Lyndsy Fonseca mistaken belief that he's gay, the next he's wrestling three armed men in the gutter. There's a superb moment in which Kick-Ass decides to leap between tall buildings, then thinks better of it, such subversion of comic book lore jostling for space with simpler pleasures, like two geeky teen superheroes dancing goofily to Gnarls Barkley's Crazy as they cruise the New York streets. But these more engaging elements are ultimately overtaken by cartoonish mayhem in a less imaginative, more gratuitous second half that - while fine in itself - largely abandons the excellent premise in favour of stylised gore. It's still a very worthwhile film, with well-drawn characters, a glorious sense of the unexpected and a dozen huge laughs.