Super Rad

It's not a bird. It's not a plane. It's just a kid. But his film vehicle lives up to his moniker in Kick-Ass.

by Drew Lazor

[ City Paper Grade: B+ ]

By night, the cult figure Kick-Ass dons a painted-on green-and-yellow jumpsuit, straps a pair of lethal batons to his back and steps into the shadows, prowling for wrongs in desperate need of righting. By day, though, he's a squeaky-voiced high school nobody named Dave Lizewski who might as well be the Invisible Man.

Based on a screenplay written in lockstep with Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s seven-part Marvel series, Kick-Ass asserts that the beloved caped superheroes who have shaped comic-book culture — and by proxy, influenced culture at large — will never be as emblematic as the capes themselves. And it does so with a nervy nonchalance toward violence and profanity that hasn't been seen since Kill Bill: Vol. 1 made the fanboys roar seven years ago.

Dave, played by Brit newcomer Aaron Johnson with the sort of exophthalmic awkwardness that makes you want to stuff him into a locker, has a few good buddies (Clark Duke and Evan Peters), a doting, clueless dad (Garrett M. Brown) and a serious crush named Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca). He's a typical bored teen who happens to be way into comics (cue atomic wedgie!), and he struggles with the idea that the masked avengers who leap off the editions he thumbs through daily aren't present in real life to regulate injustice. His friends think he's nuts, but that doesn't stop the beanpole from purchasing all the appropriate accoutrement off the Web and easing into his menacing moniker.

Of course, Dave is a misguided moron, free from the burdens of ability and talent, and has no idea what he's doing. After a botched crime-fighting incident leads to a lengthy hospital stay, metal-reinforced limbs and nerve damage — and, in classic high school fashion, the salacious, rapid-spreading rumor that he's gay — he decides to hit the streets hard. His sloppy "rescue" of a beatdown victim makes its way onto YouTube, and the clip catches fire, earning millions of views and attention from all corners (even Craig Ferguson loves him). The hapless hero sets up a MySpace page to filter the public's deluge of requests for help.

When he runs aground in the lair of a drug king who's been harassing do-gooding Katie at her job at the needle exchange, Kick-Ass is saved by Hit-Girl (a tremendous Chloë Grace Moretz, pictured), a tween killing machine who's almost as handy with a bladed bo stick as she is with grossly age-inappropriate language. We come to find out she's a real crimefighter — not a fed-by-Internet-fame construct like Kick-Ass — on a vigilante mission, along with equally lethal, Shatner-stammering father "Big Daddy" (Nicolas Cage), to wrest control of the underworld from mafia capo Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong, best sullen scowl in the business). The duo has been screwing with D'Amico's pocketbook for months, picking off his hired muscle with style and seriously hexing the bottom line of his various shady endeavors. D'Amico's slack-jawed teenage son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, doing McLovin' at half-power), eager to get in pop's good graces, agrees to develop his own super-persona — the gadget-armed Red Mist — with the aim of winning the trio's trust.

Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), who wrote, directed and produced, chose to shoot Kick-Ass in a candy shell, with colors sizzling off the screen between fits of gruesome and clearly crowd-pleasing violence. Vaughn's devil-don't-give-a-shit treatment of mass slaughter is part of the reason why 13-year-old Moretz's prepubescent Hit-Girl has proven controversial — she drops as many off-color curse words as she does bodies. (Accusations of her character being portrayed as a sexual object, however, are not only untrue, but disgusting and damaging.)

It's easy to assume this movie satirizes the super-genre, but that's not quite accurate — it's a surface-level exploration of what superheroes mean to us, yes, but all told it's a relatively traditional actioner with enough comedic value to temper all that arterial spurting. The real distinguishing characteristic of Kick-Ass is that it's devoid of all traces of mortal transcendence — there are no radioactive spider bites driving Dave to use his might to make right. There's no real motivation, even, for him to pick up the hero torch, save for something we all long for at one point or another: the desire to be admired. "With no power, comes no responsibility," goes his lackadaisical Peter Parker-inspired mantra. And everyone wants to be responsible for something.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

Kick-Ass | Directed by Matthew Vaughn, A Lionsgate release, Opens Friday in area theaters