With no major studio backing comes an original take on the superhero genre

Rating: 8/10 (25 April 2010)

Kick-Ass is probably the most purely entertaining film of the year. It has memorable characters, a good script and a great premise from which it builds a formidable film. Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn whose Layer Cake showed what potential he had as a director after sometime working mainly as a producer. Here in his adaptation of Mark Millar's comic book he's taken a premise that it is hard to believe no one has used before and built a superb film around it. Set, to start with, in a relatively realistic world we meet Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), who as we're told by a slightly patronising voice over is your typical teenager who wonders why no one every tried being a superhero before. His two best friends Marty and Todd quickly shoot down his idea telling him how ridiculous it would be. Case in point the film opens with an apparent superhero taking a swan dive off a skyscraper spreading his "wings" before promptly landing face first into a taxi. That's why.
But Dave is convinced he can do it, he goes ebay and buys a costume and sets out to fight crime. His first effort goes horrifically wrong as he's beaten to within an inch of his life by two low life hustlers. There is plenty of dark humour, especially early on in this film. Undeterred and with metal reinforcing some of his bones a la wolverine and destroyed nerve endings he sets out again and manages to take down three thugs in a protracted, messy, amateurish fight. This is captured on a mobile phone and before long the video is on youtube and Kick-Ass is a national phenomenon.
In a much less realistic realm that the film moves into, smoothly I might add, exist Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. These two, particular the former , overshadow Kick-Ass despite having less of the screen time. Chloe Moretz is a revelation as the 12 year old who has been trained, pretty much from birth, by her father (Nicholas Cage) to be a costumed vigilante. The action sequences which these two are involved in are fantastic and one in particular late in the film is bound to get the adrenaline running as Hit-Girl takes on an entire mob single handedly set to the theme from Sunshine, this was one of the best action sequences I've seen in a while. There is great humour in the relationship between these two as well, particularly in an early scene as Cage shoot Moretz in the chest so that she can learn to take a bullet is probably the funniest in the film.
At first it is difficult to see where these two story lines might come together but that's where Frank D'Amico, Mark Strong on fantastic form as he always seems to be, comes in. Frank is the head of the mob that Big Daddy has targeted. As Hit-Girl and Big Daddy work there way through the lower ranks of Frank's men all the information that he gets is that some costumed vigilante is responsible, he concludes it is Kick-Ass. This sets the plot hurtling towards the inevitable conclusion although there are some great sparks of originality along the way.
Kick-Ass is a good film full of great moments of humour and action, it was hard not to smile when Ennio Morricone's comes on in a final scene as a blatant reference to Sergio Leone's westerns. There are flaws in this film, I'm not sure about how easily Kick-Ass gets the girl and the ending when all is said and done is very formulaic, not that this detracted from my enjoyment of those scenes, indeed it is hard to see how or indeed why Vaughn would want to make this film any other way.