Kick Ass (15)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Starring: Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Hapless 'Average Joe' deciding to suit up and take the law into his own hands? Check. Bad guy with a son who has daddy issues? Check. Hero with a chequered past and a bone to pick with the villain? Check. His eleven year old daughter with the film's most colourful one-liners and a way of taking out fully grown goons that is as natural as breathing? Check, check, che... wait a minute.

Kick Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust) and adapted from the comics written by Mark Millar, is a film that explores just what happens if you try to be a superhero without any actual super-powers.

Nerdy teenager Dave Lizewski (Johnson) decides that one day he wants to have a crack at fighting crime. Clad in a wetsuit bought from Ebay and armed with nothing but the best intentions, his first foray out into vigilante justice ends when Dave gets the beating of a lifetime and ends up in hospital having metal plates attached to his bones (name that reference). Dave's next outing earns him instant infamy after mobile phone footage of Dave taking on 3 attackers ends up on the internet, attracting unwanted attention from local mob-boss (Strong) and his superhero-wannabe son (Mintz-Plasse). Enter actual superheroes Big Daddy (Cage) and Hit Girl (Moretz) who haul Dave's backside out of the proverbial fire and impart some pearls of wisdom, before taking off to finish some business of their own.

Johnson, fresh from the Neil Lennon biopic 'Nowhere Boy', breathes life into Dave, keeping him from following the cliché route that it would have been so easy to follow. In fact, the entire cast turns in a stellar performance, but if has to be said, the real star of the show has to be Moretz's Hit Girl.

Her performance, cemented the first time she appears on screen having a bullet put into her chest by Cage so that she can see what it feels like (she was wearing body armour) set the tone for her character for the rest of the film. Comparisons were drawn by some critics between Moretz's performance and that of Natalie Portman in Leon (although Portman would have never been able to burst into a room and take out a crowd of thugs without drawing breath) are entirely warrented – even if this was a contributing factor to the Daily Mail falling over itself in its haste to label Kick Ass a “twisted...crime against cinema”.

Not shying away from its status as a comic-book film, Kick Ass is packed with references to other superhero films, some obvious, and some requiring a bit more thought to unpick. Most blatant has to be Nicolas Cage's performance - with the biggest surprise being how Cage has managed to keep Batman's lawyers away from the door for so long. Ranging among the more subtle variety would have to be the scene which takes place with a billboard featuring Claudia Schiffer in the background (Schiffer is married to Vaughn, and so it's a tongue in cheek moment to make sure you're paying attention).

Vaughn manages to keep the pace of the film consistent throughout through not only the skills of the actors he is working with, but by making sure that there is always something to keep the audience's attention, be this making reference to other films within the genre, or employing different tactics to tell the tale (such as Big Daddy's backstory being shown in full comic format on the screen).

The grand finale of the film features a gloriously well played out gun battle between the Bad Guys (capital B, capital G) on one side, and Kick Ass and Hit Girl on the other (no prizes for guessing who wins, but the weapon used will not be one you'd expect), and of course, left the film open for the inevitable sequel.

In short. Kick Ass? If you'll excuse the terrible pun... it certainly did.