Kick-Ass

Surely it’s a sign of the apocalypse when a little girl popping caps as readily as she spit’s the c-word can be described as cool. And I don't say this while crossing my arms in disgust and firing off a letter of outrage to the Daily Mail. It really is absurdly cool.

But then Mark Millar, the co-creator of the comic on which Matthew Vaughan’s film is based, has always been a whore for cool. It’s no surprise he’s now making the jump to the cinema screen. He’s Michael Bay with a brain, taking his high concept from the splash page to the widescreen and with this work he really outdid himself, coming up with the stunningly simple, post-modernist punch of Kick-Ass.

The story is the dream of anyone who’s ever read a comic book. The apotheosis of Millar’s unique brand of gilded ‘What If’ epics. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your typical high school kid, living in a perpetual wet dream, ignored by his contemporaries, and escaping to the geeky confines of the local comic book store for a daily absorption of superheroes.

The fateful decision to don a makeshift costume of his own leaves him with an ass-kicking, but makes him an internet phenomenon. Unfortunately it also puts him on the radar of the local crime boss, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), his needy son Chris/Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and the real-deal vigilantes Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz).

For the most part, scriptwriter Jane Goldman has done a sterling job of adapting the comic for the screen. Millar’s work can, at times, feel little more than a 12-year-olds’ adrenalised attention deficit disorder fantasy, so fleshing out the more fragmented parts and making them a cohesive whole is an impressive feat. Additional jokes and lines feel organic and the early parts of the film move at an exhilarating pace.

She is ably supported by Matthew Vaughn, who is growing in confidence as a director. He’s more than capable of matching the demands of the comic panel, his roving camera as expressive as the flow of the artist’s pen as we watch Big Daddy decimate in a tracking shot. His use of cute captions, four colour compositions and backstory artwork combine in a subtle expression of the story’s origins.

It’s a shame the tone is so inconsistent. How, for example, do we go from a guy in a wet suit using sticks to fight off some street punks to him cocking the Gatling attachment on a jet pack like some nod to both Bond and the Matrix movies? The sickening reality of what it’s really like to stand up for truth and justice is a knife in the gut and a bone-crunching kiss from a speeding car, not increasing levity and encroaching fantasy that seeks to undermine the serious tone and put a more cartoonish one in its place. And this extends to the characters.

Sad to say, but Cage is both the best and worst thing in the movie. His Adam West Batman in cadence and costume is hilarious, but it also makes the existing satire more overt and campy. It’s a shame because he establishes an utterly persuasive dynamic with Moretz and the calm of his hot-chocolate-and-cajoling drill instructor exterior makes the sudden pops of mania more surprising.

As good as Aaron Johnson is as Kick-Ass - bonkers, brave and utterly out of his depth - this isn’t carried across to his alter-ego, who seeks a happy ending he just doesn’t deserve. It’s a betrayal because it’s what’s expected and in a universe of pre-pubescent predators this feels like a cop-out.

Speaking of which, Moretz deserves better. Hit-Girl is the star of the movie, no doubt about it. But the original image, the one from the comic, is grotesque. A child drenched in blood, an unsettling mixture of fragility, padlocked innocence and stone-cold self-assurance. This is diffused in the film by the comedy of a pint-sized Terminator turning a Kingpin’s penthouse into a gun-fu gymnasium.

Her brutality isn’t deranged, it’s dress-up rebellion with Joan Jett and The Banana Splits theme on the soundtrack. Where before you were both horrified and horribly entranced - a cool that’s so not cool - in the film it feels like a cool without consequence; the good guys bouncing back from punishment with a flannel and a nose bleed.

All of this is sadly exemplified in the climax that strives for edgy, but chokes at the last second. Paring down the violence is understandable, but diluting it with slapstick between schlubs is actually worse and just too absurd to truly have an impact. Well, no less absurd than being intimidated by a slightly ballsier McLovin in the inevitable sequel to this frequently fantastic, yet frustratingly flawed movie.