A slap in the face that’s fun: Kick-Ass turned the classic superhero movie on its head in 2010 and spiced it up with a good dose of violence and black humor.
Even the premise doesn’t bow to genre conventions: Normal teenager Dave Lizeski decides to fight crime as a superhero. Without superpowers, without a desire for revenge, simply because he was inspired to do so by comics. Matthew Vaughn’s black-humored superhero comedy Kick-Ass, produced by Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B among others, takes the genre for a ride and is just plain fun to watch
The best version for home cinema is available from Amazon.
A merciless 11-year-old and a delightfully controlled Nicholas Cage: This is Kick-Ass
New York ottonormal teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes inspiration from comic books and makes himself a superhero costume out of a bright green diving suit and two batons. During his first mission, Dave is stabbed and rammed by a car. In hospital, some of his bones are replaced with metal, allowing him to endure severe pain
Nevertheless, most adventures end with him taking a beating. That all changes when he meets grim ex-cop Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) and his eleven-year-old daughter Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a cold-blooded avenger who is stirring up the underworld of New York with her father and stands by him.
Like the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., the film adaptation also balances between Lizewski’s coming-of-age story and the parody of the superhero transformation. The latter, however, is the true strength of Kick-Ass, which discovers new standards, dimensions and sides to the superhero film with its over-the-top action.
But above all, the young Chloë Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl regularly steals the show with her dry one-liners But Nicolas Cage is also unbearably cool and hard-boiled and rarely lets his guard down
FILMSTARTS chief critic Christoph Petersencriticizes in his review that the clever superhero satire including social criticism hardly plays a role in the action-heavy second part.
Nevertheless, he concludes that “Kick-Ass fulfills its title promise to the fullest satisfaction [and] kicks conservative Hollywood in the ass with a running start. “Friends of wacky action and dark humour can therefore do no wrong, only delicate minds should perhaps look elsewhere.
