The most amazing superpower you’ll encounter in “Kick-Ass” isn’t that it enlivens one of the dullest movie genres, or that it scores laughs out of children plummeting to their deaths, getting shot in the chest and using language that would make a drill sergeant blush. No, prepare for amazement: This thing makes Nicolas Cage cool again.
Far from falling into the same category as the Spider- and X-Men movies (all of them as predictable as a trip to the grocery store), “Kick-Ass” is a brutally funny deconstruction, a hybrid of “Watchmen” and “Superbad” filtered through John Woo. It’s a boisterously original piece of entertainment . . . that isn’t for everyone. Note the rating, which should be triple-R, as in Really, Remarkably R.
A nerdy high school kid (Aaron Johnson, about whom you will be hearing much more) tires of being mugged, orders himself a scuba suit online and styles himself a crime fighting warrior named Kick-Ass. Almost immediately, he finds himself getting stabbed and run over by a car.
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That sequence is played as serious drama, though other episodes of bloodiness are surreal black comedy. “Kick-Ass” never leaves you in much doubt about what your reaction should be, but as fun as it is, you can sense the lurch from gear to gear as it shifts tone. One minute, for instance, Kick-Ass and another fake kid superhero called Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who will introduce a boot to your posterior if you ever call him McLovin again) are singing Gnarls Barkley; the next they’re in serious danger. The movie also suffers from the bland villainy of a snarling drug dealer played by Mark Strong, who was also a bore in “Sherlock Holmes.” Ah, but what wonders he’s up against: not just Kick-Ass (whose shtick becomes kind of a bore in the middle of the movie, especially when he is mewling around an insipid would-be girlfriend) but two more ingeniously imagined homebrewed heroes.
I hesitate to spoil the details, since discovering who they really are is one of the movie’s central pleasures — but all of this comes up early on and it’s impossible to talk about the movie’s main story otherwise. Suffice it to say that the drug dealer is a target of revenge from an ex-cop (a very funny Nicolas Cage) who is pretending to be a Batman-style masked avenger named Big Daddy, and his sweet 11-year-old daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz). Real name: Mindy. Superhero identity: Hit Girl.
Hit Girl may be the coolest assassin since Jules in “Pulp Fiction.” If you get a chance to wager on this year’s hot Halloween costume, bet the farm on her. She’s the baddest, funniest, killingest and coolest female superhero ever. (Sorry, Elektra.) She’s so beyond awesome that once we’ve seen what she can do, she hijacks the whole movie. Director Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) plays coy with her but eventually delivers with three of the most brilliantly executed (and I do mean executed) attack scenes of recent years.
Vaughn, the former protégé of the formerly promising “Sherlock Holmes” director Guy Ritchie, may turn out to be one of the most vivid and original action movie makers. His visuals, as in “Layer Cake,” are punctuated with moments of startling beauty (note the scene where Hit Girl looms in the darkness, blinding her enemies with blades of light) and his flair for picking a soundtrack is up there with Quentin Tarantino. (I particularly enjoyed his demented use of a punk cover of the la-la-la theme to the ‘60s kid show “The Banana Splits.”)
Vaughn will go anywhere for a joke, and comedy is like an explorer: If it isn’t staking out new territory, it isn’t doing its job. A tiny murderess in a fuchsia wig using the one swear word that is still a bit shocking (at least to Americans)? You’ll experience a sharp intake of breath, then expel it with a whoop. Hit Girl, you are my hero.
kyle.Smith@nypost.com