Don't be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood



Kick-Ass (15)



Verdict: Evil

Rating:

Millions are being spent to persuade you that Kick-Ass is harmless, comic-book entertainment suitable for 15-year-olds.



Don't let them fool you. Kick-Ass has been so hyped that it is certain to be a hit. It is also bound be among the most influential movies of 2010. And that should disturb us all.

It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.

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The title character is nerdy American teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson from Nowhere Boy). He yearns to be a superhero so he dresses up as one. The trouble is that he has no superpowers and - unlike Batman - no money.

His one asset as a crime fighter is that he can survive serious thrashings because his nerve-endings have been destroyed by previous beatings. Like Wolverine in X-Men, he has metal plates where some of his bones should be.



The movie's central appeal is to fanboys like Dave, who will spot the references to previous comic-strip movies, and imagine that these constitute satire. Really, the tone of the movie is deferential pastiche.

The plot is an unimaginative clone of Spider-Man 2, and the screenplay - by director Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, wife of comic-book enthusiast Jonathan Ross - conforms slavishly to the cliched norms of Hollywood action movies by working towards not one but two huge action set-pieces at its climax.

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As a rip-off of its Hollywood betters, it is sporadically funny, efficient, and well shot - hence my arguably overgenerous award of one star.

The biggest problem of the movie, creatively speaking, is that it has pretensions to intelligence but is profoundly, irredeemably bone-headed.

It starts as though it's going to expose the huge gulf between comic strips and reality, but ends up reducing the real world to the most morally fatuous kind of comic strip.

A worthwhile satire on comic-book culture might criticise the idiotic way it uses sadism and voyeurism to entertain, with no thought of the social consequences.

It would also lampoon the risible pretentiousness of many so-called graphic novels. Kick-Ass does neither.

The movie looks at first as if it might satirise the era where talentless nonentities can become celebrities. But it has nothing to say about that either.

Although it runs nearly two hours, there's even less character development than there is social comment. Our hero learns nothing, except that extreme violence against criminals is cool, which is something he thought in the first place.

The reason the movie is sick, as well as thick, is that it breaks one of the last cinematic taboos by making the most violent, foul-mouthed and sexually aggressive character, Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old.

Played with enormous confidence by Chloe Moretz, she's the most charismatic character in the movie. She may not realise it, but she has been systematically abused by her father, brainwashed and turned into a pint-sized

She believes that her vigilante dad (played, simplistically, for laughs by Nicolas Cage) is a hero just as much at the end as she did at the beginning.

Her attitude towards him doesn't mature, which makes her pathetic, rather than cool. The fact that many people who see the film are going to think she is cool is one of its most depressing aspects.

The movie's writers want us to see Hit-Girl not only as cool, but also sexy, like an even younger version of the baby- faced Oriental assassin in Tarantino's Kill Bill 1. Paedophiles are going to adore her.



One of the film's creepiest aspects is that she's made to look as seductive as possible - much more so than in the Mark Millar and John Romita Jr comic book on which this is based. She's fetishised in precisely the same way as Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft movies, and Halle Berry in Catwoman.



As if that isn't exploitative enough, she's also shown in a classic schoolgirl pose, in a short plaid-skirt with her hair in bunches, but carrying a big gun.



And she makes comments unprintable in a family newspaper, that reveal a sexual knowledge hugely inappropriate to her years.



Oh, and one of the male teenage characters acknowledges that he's attracted to her.



Now, children committing violent and sexual acts should be a matter for concern. Children carrying knives are not cool, but a real and present danger.



Underage sex isn't a laugh. Recent government figures revealed that in this country more than 8,000 children under the age of 16 conceive every year.



Worldwide child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry. In Africa and South America, brutalised youngsters who kill and rape are rightly feared as members of feral gangs or child soldiers.



Movies such as City Of God, Innocent Voices and Johnny Mad Dog have treated the issue with sensitivity.



But in Kick-Ass, childish violence of the most extreme kind - hacking off limbs, shootings in the mouth, impalings and fatal stabbings - is presented with calculated flippancy, as funny, admirable and (most perversely of all) sexually arousing.



The film-makers are sure to argue that there's nothing wrong with breaking down taboos of taste - but there are often good reasons for taboos.



Do we really want to live, for instance, in a culture when the torture and killing of a James Bulger or Damilola Taylor is re-enacted by child actors for laughs?



The people behind this grotesque glorification of prematurely sexualised, callously violent children know full well that they are going to make a lot of money, and they'll get an easy ride from the vast majority of reviewers, who either don't care about the social effects of movies or are frightened to appear ' moralistic' or 'judgmental'.



The truth is, of course, that all critics moralise and make judgments, whether they realise they are doing so or not. So please don't be misled. Kick-Ass is not the harmless fun it pretends to be.



Yes, it's lightweight and silly, but it's also cynical, premeditated and mindbogglingly irresponsible.



And in Hit-Girl, the film-makers have created one of the most disturbing icons and damaging role-models in the history of cinema.





