A story about a teenager who yearns to be a superhero, and a little girl who’s the star of her own splatter-happy head trip, the big-screen comic “Kick-Ass” could not be more calculating, or cynical. Fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely violent, the film at once embraces and satirizes contemporary action-film clichés with Tarantino-esque self-regard  it’s the latest in giggles-and-guts entertainment.

The filmmaking isn’t in the same league, of course, and the blonde doing the slicing and dicing here isn’t Uma Thurman but Chloë Grace Moretz, who was 11 when she slipped into her purple wig and killer affect. (She’s now 13.) Her casting has set off alarms about the uses and abuses of child performers, though perhaps less for the violence she pantomimes than for the expletives she blithely delivers. Ms. Moretz plays Mindy Macready, a cutie-pie with blond pigtails, who regularly enters into avenger mode as Hit-Girl. With Nicolas Cage, who plays Mindy’s father, Damon, a k a Big Daddy, Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.

It’s a good thing, too, because without those monkey moves, Ms. Moretz’s queasy charm and Mr. Cage’s patented freak-show turn, “Kick-Ass” would quickly fade. It meanders to a start when Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a high school dweeb with superhero dreams, buys a green-and-yellow wet suit and takes to the streets as the masked crusader of the film’s title. He soon finds plenty of trouble and instantaneous Internet fame, going on to attract the attention of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy as well as that of Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), a supervillain with a couple of Warhols and a teenager (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Eventually, these parts flashily come together for the usual bang, gurgle and splurt.

The man behind this bang-bang is Matthew Vaughn, a British producer of Guy Ritchie crime films who, with “Layer Cake,” became a director of Guy Ritchie-style crime films. Mr. Vaughn wrote the screenplay for his new movie with Jane Goldman, adapting it from the comic illustrated by John Romita Jr. and written by Mark Millar. Mr. Millar also wrote the comic “Wanted,” which was turned into a similarly hyperviolent Angelina Jolie vehicle directed by Timur Bekmambetov. “Kick-Ass” has a far brighter palette than “Wanted,” but the body count and certainly its what-me-worry attitude toward bloodletting is comparable. In “Wanted,” slo-mo bullets tear through flesh, allowing you to admire the special-effects handiwork; here, a goodfella pops a guy in a giant microwave and asks about the setting. Bada-boom!