Will superhero flick 'Kick-Ass' be a super hit?
Don't be too surprised next Halloween if you go to the front door and find a short person standing there in a purple wig, black cape and plaid Catholic schoolgirl skirt, carrying smoke bombs, swords and an automatic pistol.
If you hear "Trick or treat," give her (or him) what she wants.
If you hear "Trick or -- treat!" move away from the door.
Hit Girl - the 11-year-old, pint-size assassin in the aptly titled "Kick-Ass" (roaring into a theater near you Friday) - seems destined to inspire more Halloween costumes than Harry Potter, and also a certain amount of awe: Did she really say what you think she said? Yes, and for all the corpses she leaves in her wake, it's going to be Hit Girl's mouth that inspires the upraised eyebrows, and the laughs. "I've had more complaints about her language," said director Matthew Vaughn, "than the fact that she kills 50 people."
"Kick-Ass," being released by Lionsgate, is an odd duck - an independently produced superhero movie that wasn't so much inspired by a comic book series as grew up alongside one: The "Kick-Ass" graphic novels were being produced by Mark Millar (and illustrated by John Romita Jr.) while the script was being written (No. 8 came out just as the film was finished).
Vaughn and Millar had met at a party. "He was talking about the history of superheroes," Vaughn said. "How Batman was created in the 1930s, Superman around the same time. Then Iron Man and Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four in the '60s. Watchmen in the '80s. He wanted to create a modern-day superhero character" - one who doesn't let his lack of superpowers stop him.
Their hero, Vaughn said, "doesn't understand how everybody wants to be Paris Hilton and nobody wants to be Spider-Man. Mark said, 'That's the concept,' and I said, 'You know what? That's cool.' "
The resulting adventure/ slasher/comedy centers on Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a Peter Parker-ish high-school Everyman who's sick and tired of the bullying and street crime around his New York neighborhood (although filmed in London, the movie masquerades as Manhattan and Long Island). Wearing a wet suit he buys online, and carrying a pair of nightsticks, Dave assumes the nom-de-fantasy Kick-Ass, and while setting out to do just that, has it done to him instead.
But his misadventures wind up online, where an adoring public makes him an instant, citywide hero - attracting the attention of real-life crime fighters Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter, Mindy, aka Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz), as well as Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), the evil mobster that our very lethal father-daughter team has been chasing down for years.
At the risk of sounding naive, "Kick-Ass," with its R rating and saturation-level violence, would seem to be out of reach of the very people it's aimed at - namely, prepubescent girls with whom Hit Girl would be a hit. Vaughn disagrees.
"I'm convinced that the demographics that everyone lives by have changed," he said from London. "It's always been like 13- to 16-year-olds, 18- to 25-year-olds, and no one seems to exist after that. But I'm convinced that here's a huge amount of, let's say, 18- to 40-year-old men who have virtually the same taste when it comes to material - they watch the same movies, the same sports, play the same video games. I'm 39 and I think compared to years before we're more like 29-year-olds now. In my mind, I made the movies for 18- to 40-year-old men who haven't grown up."
And women. "They're loving it," he said.
The cast includes a number of up-and-comers including the young and gifted Moretz and English-born Johnson ("The Greatest"), who makes a thoroughly convincing middle-class New Yorker. Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin in "Superbad") plays the nerd-cum-hapless superhero Red Mist. Cage, on the other hand, seems to have come full circle.
"When people fell in love with Nic Cage was when he was doing 'Raising Arizona' and 'Wild at Heart,' " Vaughn said. "I think he's tapping back into that." It is a patently weird and almost classic Cage role - a father who talks like Mister Rogers but has raised his daughter to be a super assassin from the age of 5, so she can avenge the death of the mother she never knew. Moretz, needless to say, hits the nail on the head, cuts it in two, then shoots it. A sequel seems like a no-brainer, although Vaughn is cautious about such a prospect.
"We can only afford to do the sequel if the movie's a hit," he said with a laugh. "I think the only film that's been done like ours is 'District 9,' a big commercial-style film done independently. But while I think we're the 'Avatar' of the independent world, I don't think it's a good idea to plan sequels before the first film's been released."
