Kick Ass

Lets just say upfront that Kick Ass moves well and is generlaly entertaining. However I think the hype machine surrounding it hurts it a little bit in that the expectation is you're going to see the ultimate deconstruction of super-hero films when, at its core, Kick Ass ends up being a grittier, more profane, twist on the genre. For awhile at the beginning it looks like its going to follow a darker path and really try to show what happens when real people dress up in costume and fight crime (I think we can all agree that in real life they'd end up dead), but it ultimately diverges into a more conventional narrative. If anything it has a lot in common with the criminally underrated Mystery Men, in that they both send up the genre's conventions while ultimately being faithful to the core elements that make people enjoy about costumed vigilantes beating up overweight gangsters.

All that said once you accept what Kick Ass is, its pretty enjoyable. Aside from our title character (a high school nerd who has a slightly above normal tolerance to pain and rather than having a romantic kiss in the rain with his girlfriend ends up nailing her in the alley behind the comics book store ), the real enjoyment comes from the father- daughter crime fighting duo of Hit Girl and Big Daddy, with the latter being played by the one and only Nicolas Cage. As regular readers will realize from my love of The Bad Lieutenant, I can never get too much Cage in my life and he doesn't dissapoint here. My particular favorite touch is how he applies mustache extenders when suiting up in order to mask his true identity (because if there's one thing we all know a Fu Manchu will confuse everyone). Hit Girl is also great and goes a long way to supporting the idea that little kids beating up adults and spouting profanity is always funny.

So yeah, Kick Ass doesn't reinvent the wheel but it exhibits a nice sense of humor and good sense of pace and style. It'll be interesting to see what the already planned sequel does with the material since I didn't feel like there was any kind of over-reaching plot line in play. But its not like The Godfather did either, right?