Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is an ordinary, slightly geeky teenager with a love for superhero comic books and a fear of the opposite sex. One day he asks himself Kick-Ass‘s critical question: “How come nobody’s ever tried to be a superhero?”
Refusing to ponder for long, he buys a green and yellow wetsuit, a tazer-gun and a pair of ninja swords online — and steps out on to the streets of New York to fight crime.
Dave styles himself as Kick-Ass, a superhero without super powers. He roams the crime-ridden streets of the city looking like a frog stuffed inside a condom and promptly gets his own ass kicked by bad guys. Emerging from hospital several weeks later, with metal plates in his back and dulled nerve endings, Dave has a much higher pain threshold and no desire to call it quits. When his next fight is captured on cellphone camera and uploaded to YouTube by an onlooker, Kick-Ass becomes an internet sensation. More ominously, however, he also earns the attention of no-nonsense mob boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong).
As it turns out, Dave is not the only superhero in the city. Father-and-daughter combination Damon and Mindy Macready (Nicolas Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz) spend their days plotting vengeance against the corruption-ridden NYPD and D’Amico for framing Damon, a former cop. His lengthy jail term left him a widower and his daughter a temporary orphan. Armed and dressed to the teeth, this daddy-and-daughter duo of superhero vigilantes will not rest until justice is delivered at the barrel of a super-charged gun.
Damon’s alter ego is Batman look-alike Big Daddy, which Cage pulls off in a capable, understated way. Thirteen-year-old Moretz’s performance as the baby-faced Hit Girl, however, is utterly explosive, and will leave a searing pint-sized purple imprint on your memory long after the credits roll. She’s the movie’s real superhero: foul-mouthed, tough and as deadly with a samurai sword as she is with ninja throwing stars.
When Kick-Ass, Big Daddy and Hit Girl become too hot for the mob to handle, D’Amico’s son (and biggest disappointment) Christopher Mintz-Plasse offers to step into the fray as Red Mist. Armed with a $200 000 pimped-up Ford Mustang, Red Mist befriends Kick-Ass and infiltrates the superhero circle. Mintz-Plasse, who starred as McLovin in the teen comedy, Superbad, gives another superbly gormless performance here.
Comic-book collectors will know that Kick-Ass is based on the Marvel Comics series written by Mark Millar and illustrated by John S Romita Jr. Marvel Comics has, in the past, brought popular culture such superhero stalwarts as the Hulk, Spider Man, Iron Man and X-Men. Kick-Ass was in production at the same time as the comic and cleverly includes a short animated comic-book sequence, illustrating the organic creative hybridity between the two mediums.
Kick-Ass‘s subversion of the superhero movie genre is directed by British filmmaker Matthew Vaughn, whose first big break was as the producer of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Vaughn brings the same brand of gritty, expletive-ridden dialogue and mind-blowing shoot-out scenes to Kick-Ass, but its tongue-in-cheek humour is its finest asset.