Kick-Ass
2010
113 minutes
rated  R

by Scott Mendelson

Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass is a film constantly at war  with itself.  It pertains to be a realistic story about what would  happen if people decided to become masked avengers in a real big city,  but it quickly gives way to implausibility and over-the-top action  that would be more at home in an 80s John Woo picture.  It wants you to take  its story and its characters seriously enough to care about them, but  it's afraid to risk alienating those who thrive on cynical detachment.   It is colorful, often well-acted by a spirited cast, and it contains a  few terrific action sequences as well as several moments of surprising  dramatic heft.  As a movie that exists purely to entertain, it gets the  job done.  But in terms of presenting a more plausible super hero saga,  it's no more realistic than Punisher:  War Zone, and it in fact suffers from some of the same issues  regarding real-world consequences vs. harmless fantasy.

Dave  Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is basically a normal American teenager.  He is  not popular, but he is not any kind of outcast.  He simply roams the  halls of high school relatively invisible to all but his close friends.   One day, he asks his comic-book geek buddies why no one ever actually  tried to be a real-life superhero?  They laugh at him, but since he has  nothing better to do, he buys a wetsuit and ventures out into the night  to fight crime.  The initial excursion ends in disaster, but his  travails eventually attract citywide attention.  Soon, not only has Dave  (calling himself 'Kick-Ass') brought the attention of the city's major  mob boss (Mark Strong) and the girl of his dreams (Lyndsy Fonseca), but  also the watchful eyes of a competing superhero team, the murderous  father/daughter duo known as 'Big Daddy' and 'Hit Girl' (Nicolas Cage  and Chloe Moretz).  Needless to say, things are about to get very  complicated very quickly.

For what works and what doesn't, and what it all measures up to, read the rest of this review at Mendelson's Memos.