KICK-ASS
(15, 117 mins)
Four stars
Starring Aaron Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Clark Duke, Evan Peters, Lyndsy Fonseca, Garrett M Brown

Being a superhero is a dangerous business in Matthew Vaughn’s brutal coming of age tale, based on the comic written by Mark Millar and John S Romita Jr.

%movie(18110)

Adapted for the screen by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, Kick-Ass is a thrilling, hilarious and at times heartbreaking portrait of teen angst that will undoubtedly raise eyebrows for its heady combination of foul-mouthed, sword-wielding children and graphic violence.

Kick-Ass taps into modern-day lawlessness and senseless brutality by pitting one regular teenager, without a single super power to his name, against real life bad guys capable of killing him with a single blow.

Geeky teenager Dave Lizewski (Johnson) lives with his father (Brown) in New York, where he attends high school and admires unattainable classmate Katie Deauxma (Fonseca) from afar.

During a conversation with comic-book obsessed pals Marty (Duke) and Todd (Peters), Dave wonders aloud if a normal guy could transform himself into a bona fide superhero.

Consequently, the teenager buys a wetsuit from the internet and becomes the heroic Kick-Ass.

Unfortunately, his first forays into crime-fighting end with a trip to the hospital.

Then the mysterious Big Daddy (Cage) and Hit Girl (Moretz) – AKA unfairly disgraced cop Damon Macready and his daughter Mindy – answer the call to arms, thwarting the ambitions of kingpin Frank D’Amico (Strong).

When D’Amico decides to fight back with the help of his son Chris (Mintz-Plasse), Dave is suddenly at the centre of a real-life battle between good and evil.

Kick-Ass is an incendiary, fast-paced jaunt though the Big Apple in the company of two motherless youngsters, who discover their strength behind the masks of their alter egos.

Johnson sports an inflexion-perfect American accent as the eponymous do-gooder and Cage delivers a decent performance, but it’s pint-sized Moretz who steals the show.

Action sequences are directed at a breathless pace – notably a night vision shootout and the storming of D-Amico’s rooftop headquarters – but the thrills never come at the expense of our emotional connection to the characters.

They kick ass and we silently cheer them, with clenched fists, from the aisles.