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.

Wanted

James McAvoy's fop haired Wesley Gibson rots in his office stall, medicated into social compliance. His monstrous, braying boss snaps staplers in his face whilst his jock colleague routinely pops over to Wes' place to shag his girlfriend. Woe unt woe. Plucked out of this 20 something malaise by big-head waif Fox (Angelina Jolie), Wes is dropped head first into the machinations of a zealot kill cabal that turns to a giant loom for direction - shades of The Moirae from Greek myth if you're very fucking generous indeed. Turns out Wes' absent poppa was King Kill, and the crypto fascist weavers are counting on nature over nurture. This is Wanted.

Adapted from Mark Millar's nasty comic series of the same name, Wanted the Movie plays like the demented doodles of the office sociopath - dull, wage-slave life is jettisoned for incalculable riches, near invincibility, no consequences gunplay and Jolie kissing. Indoctrinated into the round table, world-running dickholes club, Wes drone is given self-actualising purpose by seeking non-descript bad-man destruction. "They're evil because we tell you!" Naturally Jolie has a sympathetic sob-story to gloss over this anonymous cruelty; and that's the problem.

Wanted isn't as mean as it purports to be. Unfortunately it doesn't want to alienate the morally redemptive tastes of Cinema Goer X, and thus constantly feels the need to whiten up the greys. Ho hum. Third act revelations notionally undermine some of the until-then cast iron kill direction, but that's lost in a blur of motion and mother fuckers. If you're trying to make a film about an amoral scumbag, you might as well go the whole hog. Instead Wanted gets lost in a backwater Joseph Campbell hero quest. At least Night Watch supremo Timur Bekmambetov is having fun. Wanted is chock-full of impossible shots of bullets hurtling through space and heads. A ratty, batty showdown at Fruit of the Loom aside, Wanted hits its action peak during a French Connection referencing car chase - Wes performing gymnastic car crashes to get his mark.