Kick-Ass

To justify taking up 100 minutes of your life a movie ought to show you at least one thing you've never seen before. On the entrance of Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), the 11-year-old, cute-as-a-button angel of death in Kick-Ass, I was ready to call it a fair exchange. This fille fatale - four foot nothing, livid purple wig, armed to the teeth - dispatches bad guys with guns, knives, grenades and salty remarks (you haven't heard a little girl curse like this since The Exorcist). Trained in violent vigilantism by her crazed ‘Big Daddy' (Nicolas Cage), a disgruntled ex-cop, Hit Girl is a walking DOCS nightmare; the sweetest l'il psychopath in New York City.

We meet this lethal poppet when she comes to the rescue of Kick-Ass, a wannabe superhero who has wandered recklessly into an enclave of hardened drug dealers. Decked out in a ludicrous green wetsuit bought online, Kick-Ass is really Dave Lizewski, a high school comic book freak whose only superpowers are invisibility to girls and hyper-inflated optimism. (He's played by the likable Aaron Johnson, who does American geek as convincingly as he did nascent Beatle in Nowhere Boy.) After one humiliation too many, Dave invents his alter-ego, obtains a couple of ninja sticks and sets out into the night, pausing only to set up Kick-Ass's MySpace profile.

On his second mission, Kick-Ass rescues a man from three assailants while a café full of onlookers records the incident on their mobiles. Now an overnight YouTube phenomenon, Kick-Ass catches the attention of local crime boss Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), whose couriers have been encountering mysterious costumed resistance. D'Amico's spoiled son Chris (Superbad's marvellously dweebish Christopher Mintz-Plasse) happens to attend the same school as Dave, and has a plan to catch the unwitting amateur crusader for his dad.

When he's not dressing up like Jacques Cousteau, Dave is trying to win the affections of schoolmate Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), who has erroneously adopted him as her "gay BFF". (The movie knowingly incorporates the X-Men subtext of costumed heroics as a code for queerness.) His desire to impress Katie with his manliness is leading him into a world of pain, where seriously evil people clash with heavily armed killers like Hit Girl and Big Daddy.  

There's a grand tradition of European directors - Paul Verhoeven, Luc Besson - approaching American action films with an irreverent, off-kilter sadism that often strikes a chord with the public. Vaughn, the British director of Layer Cake, has no qualms about ruffling American sensibilities in his faithful adaptation of the savagely silly Kick-Ass comic book by Scotsman Mark Millar. With its prepubescent girl killer, allusions to online jihadist executions and superhero aspirations that fall to earth spectacularly, Kick-Ass seems to have cult hit written all over it, except that in this interactive age, cults have gone mainstream. The box office should be massive. Nick Dent