New On Netflix: Kick-Ass

Costumed vigilantism is cool and hip in director Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s cool and hip comic book series (that there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of), as a nerdy teenager soon learns that the real world doesn’t quite work the same as the funny pages when you put on a colorful get-up and start introducing yourself to criminals as “Kick-Ass.” Kick-Ass so wants to be your alternative superhero movie of choice, though something gets lost in translation between the do-whatever-you-want anarchy of indie-ish comics and a moderately-budgeted movie hoping for a mainstream-sized audience; no matter what the “tone” or the “context” may be, it’s still hard to stomach scenes involving an adult (Mark Strong) beating the everliving crap out of a child (Chloe Grace Moretz). Still, Vaughn and his team definitely deserve credit for giving this extremely difficult material a shot, though we personally wish the film had focused more on the father/daughter crimefighting duo of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Moretz); their story is about a thousand times more interesting than the one about the high school dork who finally gets laid.