Review:The Sun
Based on Mark Millar's comic book Kick-Ass, it is astounding from start to end.
As our hero Dave (Nowhere Boy's Aaron Johnson) begins his narration, asking why no one has ever tried to be a superhero, so his journey to becoming his alter ego Kick-Ass begins too.
A superhero who, armed with no powers other than a vague moral code, ends up embroiled in a massive fight.
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Johnson's comic book-loving uber-geek is the perfect guide through the movie.
Referencing the likes of Spider-Man and Batman, he lets us know that while it goes about re-booting the idea of a superhero movie, this film clearly knows where to pay its debts.
Nicolas Cage's character Big Daddy is at one point referred to, by Mark Strong's crime boss, as "The guy who looks like Batman".
This is a return to form for Cage as the vengeful cop-turned-crime-fighter but it's his daughter Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) who provides some of the greatest moments.
From the first time we meet her on wasteland where her dad is firing bullets at her armoured chest so she can learn how it feels to get shot, through to her slaughtering a room of goons to the tune of The Banana Splits, she is a never-before-seen cinematic creation.
Kick-Ass re-invents the superhero movie to the point that subsequent films in this genre may well have to check themselves against it.
Writer and director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust), having apparently refused various studio requests to tone down certain elements of the film, has consequently delivered a picture that is so uniquely brilliant, funny and ground-breaking that it could only have been made outside the Hollywood machine.
It then turned out to be so good they couldn't ignore it and so it arrives here with a justified fanfare, a slice of must-see cinema. Just phenomenal.
Star rating: Five out of five
Review:The New yorker
To point out that Matthew Vaughn’s “Kick-Ass” is based on a comic book is not saying much. A glance through the schedule suggests that every film released this year is based on a comic book or else devoutly wishes that it were, with the possible exception of that documentary on sheep pasturing. Producers reach for the Marvel shelf as instinctively as they once grazed the Book-of-the-Month Club, and for similar reasons, homing in on the sweet spot of popular taste. “Kick-Ass” began publication only two years ago, but the cover line of its second issue (“Sickening Violence: Just the Way You Like It”) bore the exact tinge of lip-smacking irony that now passes for worldly sophistication.
This rage to provoke is transferred to Vaughn’s film, which he co-wrote with Jane Goldman. Our hero is a high-school zero named Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), who has a yearning for status and substance—or, in layman’s terms, love. Since none is available, he compensates first by pretending to be a masked crime-fighter called Kick-Ass and, second, by resorting to frantic self-abuse, although I would bracket those two as a single impulse. Kick-Ass wears a cheap wetsuit and gets nowhere, until one of his pathetic attempts at justice is posted on YouTube, at which point he becomes a star. It is hard to see where the plot can go from here, so Goldman and Vaughn come to its aid by introducing a pair of real crime-fighters, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz). The twist is that they are father and daughter, perhaps the closest duo since Oedipus and Antigone, though, unless you have a particularly corrupt text, you will not find Antigone greeting a roomful of evil men with the words “O.K., you cunts, let’s see what you can do now.”
This line has already plunged the film into a froth of infamy, and, if you really think that Vaughn and Goldman (both of whom are British) planned it any other way, you are behind the times. A film casts its bait, and we bite. Vaughn knows that the vulnerability of the young is a more tremulous issue than ever, so he switches things around, leaving grownups vulnerable to their juniors. Hit Girl is eleven years old, and schooled by her father to slaughter and maim while displaying no emotion other than fizzy glee. Her first mass murder, of a drug dealer and his posse, is a flurry of cartwheels and gougings, backed by the theme tune from “The Banana Splits.” Many viewers, no question, will be jazzed up by the sensory sugar rush of this, but it’s worth asking, once the movie has calmed down, whether we have witnessed a silly mismatch of innocence and experience, to be relished for its gross-out verve, or a formidable exercise in cynicism.
“Kick-Ass” is violence’s answer to kiddie porn. You can see it in Hit Girl’s outfit when she cons her way past security guards—white blouse, hair in pigtails, short tartan skirt—and in the winsome way that she pleads to be inculcated into grownup excess. That pleading is the dream of every pedophile, and I wonder if Goldman paused to examine her contribution to the myth. (Note what the script does with mothers: Dave’s expires at the breakfast table, causing no blip in the rhythm of his life, and Hit Girl’s was dead before she was born. Thus is any trace of tenderness expunged before our tale begins.) Goldman would presumably say that it is violence, not sex, that our pre-teen heroine learns, but that is a cowardly distinction—although, to be fair, it is a cowardice shared by everyone from the M.P.A.A. down. “Kick-Ass” is rated R, which means that adults are free to take children to watch a child hurting adults: a neatly wrapped package, like “Home Alone” on growth hormones. The standard defense of such material is that we are watching “cartoon violence,” but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer—that is, to coarsen and inflame?
If you find your enjoyment of “Kick-Ass” unclouded by such issues, good luck to you. The rest of the movie feels pretty secondhand anyway, as a heavily British cast tries teeth-grindingly hard to be American. Aaron Johnson, in the title role, is the only one who doesn’t show the strain, and it’s a pity that his early goofiness is cut short; by the end, as Kick-Ass pilots a jet pack, armed with Gatling guns, around the New York skyline, any claim that the film could be spoofing, or lightly humanizing, the usual overkill of the comic book has long since been wiped away. Back to fantasy, then: just the way we like it.
1 out of 5 Stars
My verdict : I thought that Kick-ass was one of the best films i had seen that year and i completely disagree with the new yorkers highly critical view on the film. I thought that the rather british element within the film made it the movie that it ended up as.
Cinema Chains
Many cinema chains around Britain screened kickass includind the very reputable cineworld,showcase and ODEON
Money
Worldwide: Kickass made over $96 million world wide considering it only cost $26 million to make.
Opening Weekend
$19,828,687 (USA) (18 April 2010) (3,065 Screens)
£3,881,704 (UK) (4 April 2010) (402 Screens)
Gross
$48,043,505 (USA)
£11,597,750 (UK)
