“Kick-Ass” is sublime, and definitely not for kids

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Living in New York City, Dave Lizewski is your average kind of teenager. Not a geek or a jock. Just average. He wanks over his teacher, has a crush on the school fox Katie Deauxma, and dreams of being a super-hero.

“Like most people my age, I simply existed,” the amiable Dave tells us. His mum died 18 months ago, because of an aneurism, but the would-be crime fighter realises life goes on. He’s the kid who deals quietly with tragedy, keeps his head down and doesn’t use it as an excuse or a “f*ck you” badge.

But Dave’s mild mannered narration wrong foots us just like the rest of Matthew Vaughn’s sublime “Kick-Ass.” Surely ordering a wet suit online and trying to jump roofs when you clearly have no physical prowess constitutes a rare form of grief? Dave’s life is “missing” something and that something is his mum. He just doesn’t know it yet.

Vaughn usurps the super-hero genre at every given opportunity – from the opening “Superman The Movie” credits to the “Spiderman” school walk. Dave looks like Peter Parker, talks like Peter Parker and even lives down a carbon copy of his street. When his first attempt at vigilante justice ends with him being brutally stabbed and scythed down by a speeding car, what we think we know about these movies drives off with it, leaving the audience as blindsided as Dave.

Weeks later, the crippled crusader leaves hospital with more metal in him than Wolverine and damaged nerve endings that allow him to take a “kicking” better than anyone else. Irrepressible, Dave is now “Kick-Ass version 2.0” – a wry dig at the countless comic reboots stalking the multiplexes over the last few years.

During a punishing battle with three gang members, Dave is captured on camera phone and uploaded to You Tube, making Kick-Ass an overnight sensation, the irony being not one onlooker used their mobiles to call the police for help. Battered and bloody, Dave’s unrepentantly earnest defence of a complete stranger makes this scene surprisingly moving when juxtaposed next to the new-tech vultures ready to pounce on send.

Surfing this online wave of fame is fun to start with. He gets more attention, but that means dealing with crime boss Frank D’Amico, copycat super hero “Red Mist” and deadly father/daughter dynamic duo Big Daddy and Hit Girl. The last two are the real deal and well out of Kick-Ass’ league.

The hyperbolic action sequences featuring these two characters are dazzlingly original and unremittingly violent. Legs are hacked, necks are slashed and brains blown out in a kaleidoscope of set pieces. Big Daddy’s slaughter of D’Amico’s henchmen in his lumberyard is hard hitting like “The Watchmen” and Hit Girl’s extermination of some drug dealers is a delicious take on Drexel’s demise in “True Romance.”

Controversy has surrounded Hit Girl, the foul mouthed murderous eleven year old, particularly her peach of a line, “Okay you c*nts…let’s see what you can do now!” But “Kick-Ass” is not a young kids’ film. It’s a bag of dynamite thrown at our disposable culture and our misplaced sense of hero worship. Is Hit Girl really so bad, when so many of our daughters aspire to be Paris Hilton?

The film does addresses the idea of identity very well. Nicholas Cage’s edgy turn as Big Daddy is part loving father, part psychopath, part Adam West impersonation and another step in his screen rehabilitation after the incomparable “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.” Similarly, Aaron Johnson as Dave actually leads a triple life in the movie, as Dave, Kick-Ass and as Katie’s gay best friend, the only way he can initially get close to her.

Genuinely fresh and original, “Kick-Ass” looks different, it feels different, it even tastes different. Vaughn is unmasking himself as a master filmmaker, throwing off the tatty disguise of the director who helmed the uneven “Stardust.” Perhaps the tagline on the poster is about Vaughn himself: “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass!”

You bet he does.