MOVIE REVIEWS: “KICK-ASS”

Kick-Ass is expected to appeal primarily to so-called fanboys, those who eagerly snatched up the original comic book by the tens of thousands. The Chicago Sun-Times‘s Roger Ebert is not among them. Calling the film “morally reprehensible,” he writes: “A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. … I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what?” Manohla Dargis in the New York Times and others answer the question: Quentin Tarantino movies. In her review, Dargis calls the the film “fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely violent. … the latest in giggle-and-guts entertainment.” Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle uses these adjectives to describe it: “shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable.” Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail describes it as “some kind of twisted fun. Fun, because this is a comic-book movie with loads of octane and enough smarts to parody the genre even while exploiting it.” Kyle Smith in the New York Post suggests that the most amazing thing about the movie is that it “makes Nicolas Cage cool again.” Kick-Ass, he writes, “is a boisterously original piece of entertainment … that isn’t for everyone. Note the rating, which should be triple-R, as in Really, Remarkably R.” And Lisa Kennedy in the Denver Post awards it 3 1/2 stars, concluding: “It’s a send-up. No, it’s an exquisite cocktail of appreciation and originality. It’s … well, the title gets it right.”