ANTI-SOCIAL

Matthew Vaughn follows up X-Men: First Class with Kingsman: The Secret Service, another opportunity to play around with violent globetrotting. Adapted from a Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons comic that was essentially a slightly watered down version of Millar's earlier violent power fantasy Wanted - the hero isn't a rapist this time! Kingsman details the adventures of a street urchin inducted into the British secret service. Vaughn and writing partner Jane Goldman have priors ironing out the nasty in Millar projects. They previously managed to transform Kick-Ass from a tone deaf Frank Miller homage into a teen friendly summer blockbuster.

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is the first film in the series to even attempt to capture the joyful exuberance of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original comics. In the 1960s Marvel was issuing beautiful pop-art masterpieces that crossed archetypal superheroics with the naturalistic hesitancy of romance comics. First Class broadly adapts the key incidents of The X-Men #1 - Professor X trains his mutant students while Magneto experiments with his ability to control missiles.

While the Bryan Singer films heave with misunderstood loners deigning to interact, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn serve up two heroes that strive to teach. I had an idea from a half-remembered cinema screening that First Class' children got in the way, clogging up airtime that rightly should have been apportioned to Magneto's one-man Mossad routine. This isn't the case. The school environment that drives the second act allows us a deeper, more personal understanding of First Class' two leads.

We get to see James McAvoy's Xavier, a character usually presented as a pat patriarch, earn his position. This Xavier is basically a super positive youth worker, keen to create a stable setting that'll allow his children to excel. He doesn't needle or manipulate his X-Men, he challenges and praises them, daring them to do better. Michael Fassbender's Magneto tempers this exuberance with a calm, pro-mutant militancy, any cool guy posturing counterbalanced by his quiet sincerity. He's basically a dapper art teacher who'll share a ciggy with the kids.

Xavier's Atomic Age Hogwarts is framed by a socio-political milieu that takes in international brainwashing conspiracies and the Cuban missile crisis. Unusually, neither side is presented as particularly aggressive, both nations lumbered with warmongering generals being puppeteered by Kevin Bacon's ex-Nazi, Sebastian Shaw. The leader of a shadowy cabal called The Hellfire Club, Shaw plots to set the world ablaze in the hope that the radioactive fallout will genetically alter the survivors. First Class aligns mutants with those other mainstays of Cold War sci-fi, the American big bugs and Japanese kaiju. All children of the atom.

Goldman and Vaughn also steer the film away from specifically discussing X-Men as a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Perhaps they recognised that mapping two white fellows onto Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X was, at the very least, incredibly disingenuous? Ideas about individual agency do drive character arcs but they're more about self-reliance and personal pride than creating a way in which handsome white characters can feign minority status. Instead, Xavier and Magneto enjoy dilemmas keyed to their own backgrounds. The moneyed, educated Xavier purposes his wealth, using it to train an egalitarian special forces unit. Magneto is the State of Israel, getting strapped and refusing to be a victim ever again.

Training Montage

These bulletin length, character focused clips for X-Men: First Class do a better job of selling concept than the cheapy mainstream ad campaign. Instead of lightly underwhelming CG submarines being held aloft, these ads have zeroed in on minutiae, teasing a film built on X-Kid specific training sequences. With the Harry Potter franchise wrapping up, and this 60s set revision kicking off, why not make bratty school-set hijinks the crux of this film's shilling? Professor Magneto laughing at an incompetent child whiffing his abilities is worth a million million computer generated missile attacks.

Kick-Ass: The Game

It's 1992 all over again! All the big movies gotta have their scrolling beater tie-in. Like Watchmen: The End Is Nigh before it, Kick-Ass: The Game adopts a grime spin on Marvel Ultimate Alliance mechanics. Players select a universe character and rush around urban crime corners assaulting the underclass. WHA Entertainment and Frozen Codebase's Kick-Ass makes for a slightly better diversion than the plodding Watchmen episodes, offering bare environment interacts, a couple of gonzo special actions, and in-game speaks that jive well with established fiction. Kick-Ass' presentation is a bit of a muddle offering movie character drafts in gameplay and John Romita Jr's comparatively kitchen-sink funnybook originals in captioned story sequences. Kick-Ass could be a button mash wheeze, but the developers have implemented a stats hike levelling system, balancing the difficulty on the idea that players will be prepared to replay early missions to farm XP. An optimistic outlook considering the lack of depth in the fighting system, and scarcity of secret areas in the game's few levels. A sour, simplistic experience best suited to people desperate to wildly stab at vaguely related button prompts after having just seen a violent movie.

Kick-Ass

Mark Millar's most recent works have toyed with an idea of implication. Specifically, the lead as a reader analog voicing psychotic rhetoric and acting out repulsive id fantasies. Millar indoctrinates his protagonists into dream worlds, then twists everything apart. The Timur Bekmambetov helmed Wanted ditched Millar's supervillain framing and sexual grotesqueries, turning in a sugar rush tell-off that barely even attempted audience discomfort. Conversely, Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman's Kick-Ass re-purpose survives some severe character arc simplification thanks to a rigid adherence to the original text's prank ambitions.

In this new movie continuity, Aaron Johnson's Dave Lizewski gets to assert a Friday-night masculinity. He fucks his girl in an alleyway, and rescues his (thematic) little sister with fairytale weaponry. The journey's smoother, but the comic's impetuous remains. Dave craves attention, usually female. He seeks masculine empowerment through fantasy violence scenarios. He creates a form fitted, blank male super-identity to pursue noble nerd urges in the hopes of snagging himself a missus. Despite some sexuality smoothing, Dave's adventures still lead him wildly out of his depth. His violent do-gooding sees him aligned to a pair of functioning lunatics and hunted by the mob. Rather than become a shitkicking equal, Dave ends as an incompetent comedic compliment to Chloe Grace Moretz's Hit-Girl. He closes the film welted but upbeat. His fizzog frozen in a mutated sneer similar to that of Malcolm McDowell's Alex DeLarge.

Moretz, despite her size, is a thoroughly convincing physical presence. Her fight form is tailored to her speed and stature, tapping into Hong Kong body weaponry as well as the lawless amorality of excited children. Moretz is able to convey shapes and angles completely in tune with brutally straight comic lines. Best of all, Kick-Ass provides a forum for Nicolas Cage to remind dimmer bulbs just how excellent he can be. Cage's Big Daddy is a stiff necked breeze block. A Kevlar Dark Knight with a bundle of excitable colours in tow, his gait and speech informed by Adam West's staccato stab at the cowl. Kick-Ass gives us reams of recognisable bat iconography before neatly undercutting them with a venal lethality. Seeing Cage's Bat-shape roam a blister lit warehouse slitting throats, and firing handguns in extreme close-quarters is a giddy giddy thrill.