"Kick-Ass" is THE Superhero movie of the year!!!

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 2010)

Next month the first movie of the summer "Iron Man 2" arrives. But, if I may be so bold, the most awesome, thrilling, greatest super-hero movie of the year is in theaters right now! Sure, "Iron Man 2" will have more CG, bigger explosions and a 200 Million dollar budget; and you might even leave the theater with a smile on your face. But if Christopher Nolan's 'Batman' movies have taught us anything, it takes more than that to make a really awesome superhero movie. And "Kick-Ass" is a really awesome super-hero movie! The movie begins by introducing us to the central character, Dave Lizewski, played by Aaron Johnson: a slightly nerdy and extremely average high-school student. He likes comic-books; wishes girls would notice he exists; and, most of all, he is sick and tired of being mugged every other day and watching criminals run around doing whatever they want. He wishes crime-fighting super-heroes existed in the real world; and, hey, why not him? So, he orders a wetsuit off of E-Bay as a costume and goes out into the streets to fight crime as Kick-Ass. The problem is, he has no fighting skills, his only weaponry is a pair on numchucks and a taser-gun, and his physique is greatly inferior to literally every criminal he comes across. The only thing he has going in his favor is a higher tolerance for pain than the average citizen: he is the super-hero equivalent of that episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer becomes a successful boxer simply because he is able to get punched in the face a lot without it bothering him.
Yet in spite of how bad he is at being a super-hero, he manages to become a media sensation when footage of him fighting bad-guys gets posted on Youtube. And this coincides with the arrival of two new masked crime-fighters, not nearly as famous as Kick-Ass, but infinitely better crime-fighters: Big Daddy and his 11 year old daughter, Hit-Girl.
These two characters are the heart and soul of this movie. If this movie is Uma Thurman's heart in "Pulp Fiction", Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are the syringe full of adrenaline going into it.
Big Daddy, played ideally by Nicholas Cage, spends his day as nebbish cartoonist Damon Macready; but at night, with far from subtle overtones to Bruce Wayne, he dons a Batman-like suit and uses the millions of dollars he has acquired from taking down organized crime to buy a spectacular array of military weaponry. His primary target, local crime lord, Frank D'amico.
His protégé daughter, Hit-Girl, played by Chloe Moretz, has been trained since she was five to fight crime giving her the ability to run on walls, back flip through the air; and shoot guns like Chow-Yun Fat in a John Woo movie. She also a particular fondness for killing bad guys with butterfly knives.
I won't say anymore about the plot of this movie because this is one of those rare instances where the trailer doesn't give too much away; and I'll be damned if I'm gonna ruin that. Suffice to say, that when this movie kicks into high-gear, you're gonna love it.
My advice, see this movie soon and try to go when the theater is packed. Because this is not a movie that you simply watch. This is a movie that you laugh with, then clap at the screen; and then by the finale, you are simply yelling things like "Fuck, Yeah!" every few seconds and cheering until after the credits have started rolling.
Plus, it ends with a very sweet set-up for a sequel. So, see this now. Because, if "Iron Man 2" is not gonna bring anything new to the table, I want my sequel to "Kick-Ass"!