'Kick-Ass' a brazen, bloody-good superhero movie Aaron Johnson (left) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in "Kick-Ass" (Lionsgate) POST-DISPATCH FILM CRITIC 
 
 The last time I collected comic books was during Lyndon Johnson's administration, when my favorite character was a shlubby, self-made superhero called Forbush Man. MORE REVIEWS 
 
 
 
 Maybe I enjoyed the similarly themed "Kick-Ass" because it took me back to that innocent time. Or maybe it's because this is the most brazenly funny bloodbath unleashed on the public since "Pulp Fiction." 
 
 
 
 Forget Spider-Man and Batman. Meet Dave Lizewski (British actor Aaron Johnson), an ordinary teen with no superpowers, few friends and many comic books. Dave has passion for social justice and a pretty classmate named Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), not necessarily in that order. So he molds himself into a costumed crime fighter. 
 
 
 
 Trouble is, even as the spandex-clad Kick-Ass, Dave is a sitting duck for armed adversaries. Yet after a wincingly graphic beatdown leaves him with numbed senses and an Internet fan base, he has the means to expand his crusade citywide. 
 
 
 
 A mobster named D'Amico (Mark Strong, the best villain working in movies today) blames Kick-Ass for a vigilante crackdown, and he allows his spoiled, ambitious son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to sniff out Kick-Ass by posing as a potential sidekick called Red Mist. 
 
 
 
 But the actual Avengers are a ruthless father and daughter who call themselves Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz). 
 
 
 
 Cage, as a disgraced cop who's been training his 11-year-old girl for firearm-fortified payback, has never been weirder or funnier, grafting Adam West's Batman persona onto a gleeful gun nut. 
 
 
 
 And Moretz, who played the too-wise little sister in "(500) Days of Summer," is simply stunning. As the foul-mouthed action tot, this world-class scene-stealer is the Shirley Temple of doom. 
 
 
 
 Adapting a comic-book series by Mark Millar ("Wanted"), director Matthew Vaughn ("Layer Cake") nails every target in the fun house, from horny-teen angst to politically insensitive slapstick to absurdly spiraling violence that would make Scarface cry hallelujah. 
 
 
 
 After getting pummeled by "Kick-Ass," even a middle-age curmudgeon with little tolerance for fanboy hype must surrender. 
 
 The last time I collected comic books was during Lyndon Johnson's administration, when my favorite character was a shlubby, self-made superhero called Forbush Man.Maybe I enjoyed the similarly themed "Kick-Ass" because it took me back to that innocent time. Or maybe it's because this is the most brazenly funny bloodbath unleashed on the public since "Pulp Fiction."Forget Spider-Man and Batman. Meet Dave Lizewski (British actor Aaron Johnson), an ordinary teen with no superpowers, few friends and many comic books. Dave has passion for social justice and a pretty classmate named Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), not necessarily in that order. So he molds himself into a costumed crime fighter.Trouble is, even as the spandex-clad Kick-Ass, Dave is a sitting duck for armed adversaries. Yet after a wincingly graphic beatdown leaves him with numbed senses and an Internet fan base, he has the means to expand his crusade citywide.A mobster named D'Amico (Mark Strong, the best villain working in movies today) blames Kick-Ass for a vigilante crackdown, and he allows his spoiled, ambitious son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to sniff out Kick-Ass by posing as a potential sidekick called Red Mist.But the actual Avengers are a ruthless father and daughter who call themselves Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz).Cage, as a disgraced cop who's been training his 11-year-old girl for firearm-fortified payback, has never been weirder or funnier, grafting Adam West's Batman persona onto a gleeful gun nut.And Moretz, who played the too-wise little sister in "(500) Days of Summer," is simply stunning. As the foul-mouthed action tot, this world-class scene-stealer is the Shirley Temple of doom.Adapting a comic-book series by Mark Millar ("Wanted"), director Matthew Vaughn ("Layer Cake") nails every target in the fun house, from horny-teen angst to politically insensitive slapstick to absurdly spiraling violence that would make Scarface cry hallelujah.After getting pummeled by "Kick-Ass," even a middle-age curmudgeon with little tolerance for fanboy hype must surrender. | | 
 
 | Click here to read all comments, or be the first to comment on this story ||||| Chloe Moretz gives a performance of prodigious cool as Mindy Macready, also known as Hit Girl, in the dweeb-to-superhero movie. 
 
 With her Eastwood-worthy snarl, a purple wig that would do a Vegas stripper proud, and the martial arts chops of a John Woo assassin, 11-year-old Mindy Macready, also known as Hit Girl, is a force to be reckoned with. 
 
 A potty-mouthed pip-squeak trained in weaponry and weird sidelong glances by her cop-turned-vigilante freakazoid father - Big Daddy, played with typically nutty gusto by Nicolas Cage - Mindy doesn't have the title role in Kick-Ass, but her presence is everything. Chloe Moretz, a 13-year-old who has already amassed more than 30 credits on her IMDB page, gives a performance of prodigious cool. 
 
 Pushing several envelopes (extreme violence, extreme profanity, extreme smartaleckyness) and juggling teen angst comedy with superhero fantasy, Kick-Ass has been adapted from the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. comic book in nimble fashion by British director Matthew Vaughn. 
 
 It's the story of Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a dweeby New York City high schooler who decides to become a superhero - even though he hasn't been bitten by a radioactive spider, or sent here from Krypton, or even put in much time at the gym. Later in the film, this fact results in an astute voice-over observation from our would-be hero: "With no power comes no responsibility." 
 
 But Dave, who has a pair of comic book-obsessed nerd buddies and an unrequited crush on a classmate (the pert Lyndsy Fonseca), customizes a wet suit and goes out on the crime-ridden streets anyway. Armed with a couple of batons and "the perfect combination of optimism and naivete," Dave dubs himself Kick-Ass. And after he gets those words reversed on him in front of a doughnut shop crowd, videos of his valiant effort to save a guy from a mugging become a viral sensation. A YouTube phenom is born. 
 
 As fate (and Jane Goldman and Vaughn's canny screenplay) would have it, Kick-Ass unites with Hit Girl and Big Daddy to do battle against gangland boss Frank D'Amico (a mobbed-up Mark Strong, the villain in Sherlock Holmes). Meanwhile, D'Amico's sheltered, sourpuss son, Chris (Superbad's McLovin, Christopher Mintz-Plasse), has dreams of being a caped dude, too. Enter Red Mist, looking like a Kiss tribute band reject. 
 
 Kick-Ass has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun. The film wittily references Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Frank Miller's Sin City, and Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western scores (among many other films, TV shows, music, and comics). If its depiction of high school life feels cliched - lunchroom pecking orders, Internet porn masturbation jokes - those cliches have everything to do with why Dave puts on a mask and a green-and-yellow costume and busts out of there. 
 
 Does the spectacle of a preteen in pigtails slinging ninja stars and nasty epithets feel exploitive, or inappropriate, or appear to be a sign that the end of civilization is upon us? Well, in Vaughn's hands - and Moretz's ridiculously assured turn - the question is moot. Sure, Hit Girl's wild and woolly behavior shocks and startles, but that's the idea. 
 
 She pulls it off with impudence and impunity - and so does the movie. ||||| Kick-Ass, Faster Than a Speeding Internet Superheroes in the YouTube age 
 
 Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn–directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high school thugs in a Manhattan that's notably scummier than the real thing, our hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot young thing given a perm-and-glasses nerd-over), wonders, in a hilariously put-on and intermittent Brit's New Yawk accent, "How come nobaddy's eva tried to become a suppahero?" 
 
 In a New York that is part past, part near-future, and part Canadian soundstage (street crime and graffiti are at pre-Giuliani levels, but gadgetry and weaponry are cutting-edge), Dave soon learns the hard way that trying to intimidate thieves while wearing a ridiculous green wetsuit/superhero getup elicits first laughter, and then a beatdown. But as soon as he's back on his feet—this time with damaged nerve endings and steel bone reinforcements, thus minimizing his ability to feel pain—he's back on the streets, looking to fight more crime. His bumbling attempt to battle a four-man crew attracts a cell-phone cam–wielding crowd—which in turn scares off the bad guys. "Who are you?!?" asks an amateur videographer. Ready for his close-up, Dave sneers, "I'm Kick-Ass!" With that phrase and Dave's heroic antics catapulted into the memespace, Kick-Ass is real. 
 
 Vaughn approaches the teenage brain as not necessarily a function of age—adults and prepubescent girls are here equally afflicted with an identifiably adolescent lack of impulse control and concern for consequence. As Dave's double life takes shape, we're introduced to Mindy Macready (Chloë Moretz), a pigtailed blonde pre-teen whose daddy, Damon (Nicolas Cage), a wild-eyed ex-cop-turned-ex-con, trains her to take a bullet and twirl knives for the inevitable day when "some junkie asshole pulls a Glock." The happy family sees the viral Kick-Ass video on the local news, and a lightbulb goes off: There's suddenly a socially acceptable context for their hyper-violent bonding exercises—and for Damon's jones for revenge against the mafia don who set him up and sent him to prison. Soon, Damon/Big Daddy and Mindy/Hit Girl, who, unlike Kick-Ass, are actually good at ass-kicking, are wasting drug dealers behind the scenes, while Kick-Ass gets all the media cred. Eventually, they'll have to join up to wage full-on, caped-crusader-on-gangster war. 
 
 Dan Smith Pick your superhero. Details Kick-Ass 
 
 Directed by Matthew Vaughn 
 
 Lionsgate 
 
 Opens April 16 
 
 
 
 In a rare twist for a long-in-the-works film that strives to be current, the characters' reliance on technology isn't contrived. In its first half, Kick-Ass offers a fairly astute, if light, assessment of how new media has given fresh outlets for the age-old instincts of both heroism and hero worship. In an accurate mirror of teen technocratic priorities, Dave seems to be in the crime-fighting game less to save lives and more for the MySpace glory, which leads to newfound confidence, which gets him laid—and at that point, he's ready to give up the hero racket for good. But no hero (and certainly no would-be franchise-kickstarter) gets off that easy, and thus Kick-Ass launches into its second hour, a mess of random source cues and progressively brutal action set pieces shot through with shaky moralism (when a child murders grown-ups, Kick-Ass wants us to cheer, but when an adult man pummels a little girl, Kick-Ass wants us appalled). As narrative and thematic clarity falls by the wayside, Kick-Ass devolves into a show reel for its own ancillary characters; expect to see a lot of slutty Hit Girls toting mock bazookas this Halloween. 
 
 For all of its self-conscious edge, Kick-Ass feels as if Vaughn took all of his potentially powerful material and filtered it through distancing devices. It's a teen-angst movie filtered through the comic book form (literally, in the case of a number of framing techniques designed to situate Hit Girl and Big Daddy in the story), in which the characters themselves only respond to reality as filtered through comic books, TV, and social networking. Most offensively, it takes the strain of Asian pop culture centered on uniformed (and often panty-flashing) schoolgirls coolly and competently kicking the asses of grown men, which has already been filtered into American pop culture by Quentin Tarantino, and reduces it to shallow shock lines. Are we really supposed to get excited about a little girl saying words like "cock" and "douche"? Anything passed through this many filters would come out weak. Never as shocking as it thinks it is, as funny as it should be, or as engaged in cultural critique as it could be, Kick-Ass is half-assed. ||||| Lions Gate / Everett Collection Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz and Nicolas Cage in Kick-Ass. 
 
 Comic-book heroes are the Greek gods of a modern kid's mythology. At once superhuman and all too human, they rise from meager surroundings to an Olympus of grandeur. Indeed, their powers are born of their afflictions: Peter Parker's spider bite, Bruce Banner's radiation overdose, the useful mutations of the X-Men. So why wouldn't a teen, inspired by heroes he's seen in comics and movies, want to be one? In the first scene of Kick-Ass, a guy in a cool Aztec-deity costume stands on a skyscraper ledge and majestically dives off. Alas, his metallic wings don't work and he crashes  splat!  into a parked car. (See five things you need to know before seeing Kick-Ass.) 
 
 Don't try this at home, kids. 
 
 Kick-Ass  the 2008 comic written by Mark Millar and drawn by John Romita Jr., and the new film directed by Matthew Vaughn, with a script by Vaughn and Jane Goldman  could have ended in a big, ugly blood puddle too. Instead it soars, jet-propelled, on its central idea of matching a superhero's exploits with the grinding reality of urban teen life and on the aerodynamic smoothness of the film's style. (See the 100 best movies of all time.) 
 
 To apotheosize the clichés of the genre while subverting them is a neat trick, but the Kick-Ass cadre pulls it off. This is a violent R-rated drama that comments cogently on the impulses  noble, venal or twisted  that lead people to help or hurt others. Kick-Ass kicks beaucoup d'ass, in some of the dandiest, most punishing stunt work this side of Hong Kong, but it forces the grownups in the audience to acknowledge that the action is as troubling as it is gorgeous. (Preteens should definitely wait a few years before seeing this.) The result is a work that spills out of itself to raise issues about all superhero characters, all action pictures. Millar isn't boasting when he writes in the making-of book that Kick-Ass could "redefine superhero movies in the same way Pulp Fiction redefined crime movies." (See the 10 worst video game movies.) 
 
 Millar, one of the most gifted writers in comics, did the Wanted story that became a snazzy film in 2008. So he'd already done his share  along with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (Stardust) and Frank Miller (Sin City)  of redefining the action-movie cosmos. Here, though, he addresses basic questions: What is the effect of popular culture on the young who consume it? Does a kid just devour superhero stories and then void them, like fast food in paper or disc form? Or does he take them to heart, as a life guide? And if he does, say, create a costume and, with no special skills, confront the bad guys  what are the consequences? 
 
 See the top 10 post-Oscar busts.
– Teen superhero movie Kick-Ass is an over-the-top violent, funny, and subversive take on the genre that more than lives up to its name, say critics, many of whom make Tarantino comparisons. Director Matthew Vaughn's movie "soars on its central idea of matching a superhero's exploits with the grinding reality of urban teen life," writes Richard Corliss at Time. The Marvel Comics adaptation "has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun," Steven Rea writes at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joe Williams at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hasn't bought a comic book since the Johnson administration, but still loved Kick-Ass, "the most brazenly funny bloodbath unleashed on the public since Pulp Fiction." Karina Longworth at the Village Voice wasn't so impressed. "Never as shocking as it thinks it is, as funny as it should be, or as engaged in cultural critique as it could be, Kick-Ass is half-assed," she writes.