New On Netflix: Kick-Ass

Watch Kick-Ass on Netflix Instant

Watch NowAdd To Queue

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.