Trailer Tuesday: Kick-Ass

I blogged quite a while ago about Kick-Ass, the new superhero action-comedy based on the comic by Mark Millar. Now the first trailer is here.

The film, like the comic, is based on the question "What if there were superheroes in real life?" Then again, perhaps that question should be rephrased as "What if there were masked vigilantes in real life?" After all, the "heroes" in Kick-Ass have no super powers. They're physically ordinary people who take just as much damage as they dish out. For this reason you should expect Kick-Ass to be an R-rated affair due to its graphic, bloody (real world) violence and an apparent hefty dose of profanity.


Out of interest, Kick-Ass is directed by Matthew Vaughn, who has previously helmed Layer Cake and Stardust, and served as producer on such Brit gangster classics as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Audiences can be confident therefore that Kick-Ass is in the hands of someone who knows how to deftly mix wit and heart-stopping violence that punches in out of nowhere.

Kick-Ass centres on comic book geek Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) who is inspired by the many comics, films and TV shows he watches to become a real-life masked superhero - who goes by the name Kick-Ass. Despite the beatings he takes, there's enough news and YouTube coverage of Kick-Ass's actions to turn Dave into a media sensation. In turn he inspires a subculture of copy cats, is hunted by assorted unpleasant characters, and meets a father-daughter team of crazed vigilantes, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and 11-year-old Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), who are intent on taking down a local drug baron.

I think the trailer for Kick-Ass does an excellent job of setting up the film's darkly comic tone. It comes across as next year's answer to Hancock or Mystery Men in that it's a distinctly unconventional look at superheroes. At the same time there are enough hints to suggest that Kick-Ass will definitely be a film for adults only... and adults with a twisted, geeky sense of humour at that.


I normally dislike voice-overs in films (as I did with that other Mark Millar adaptation Wanted) but I think Dave's V/O in the trailer works perfectly here because it seems to be a tongue-in-cheek imitation of Spider-Man/Peter Parker's whine.

Kick-Ass is set to debut in the United States on 16 April 2010. I think its box office success there, seeing as it has a rather unusual concept, will determine when South Africans get to see it. I'm estimating sometime in May through September. Anything longer than that and I'll be upset because I'm looking forward to this one a lot, especially as it depicts one of my greatest fantasies.