Thighs Wide Shut

I bet the nemeses of Catholic Comics are the convicts of Miami Football

Kick-Ass
Escape From The Planet of The Capes
Official Website | Trailers & Mo

Wanna know what kicks ass in Kick-Ass?  Certainly not our even dorkier Peter Parkerish title character (Brit Aaron Johnson, a mother lover if there ever was one, pretending a tad too hard to be a dorkier American Peter Parker), his best buds (Clark Duke and Evan Peters, with nothing to do, cept for us to imagine how each of them would have fared in Kick-Ass’ costume), his pointless pursuit of his pointless Mary Jane Watson (Lyndsy Fonseca, missing an ‘e’ in her name, and any sort of screen presence), his semi-nemesis Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, forever stuck in McLovin mode), Red Mist’s gangster dad (Mark Strong, who’s the Samuel L Jackson of never saying no to taking a bad guy role), Red Mist’s dad’s Jersey boy thugs (no names worth noting), Toronto standing in for New York (again???) + a generic, tired, trying to be way too energetic soundtrack (think we need a moratorium placed on the use of J Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation’)

Wait, we didn’t name a dang thing that kicked-ass!  Bare with us.  We haven’t read one word of writer Mark Millar & illustrator John Romita, Jr‘s overly-meta comic book series, but then again, neither did director Matthew Vaughn and co-screenwriter Jane Goldman.  That’s cause they started filming the movie when the 3rd issue hit newsstands (do comics even hit newsstands anymore?)!  It kinda shows, cause there’s no full vision on display, juss a chop suey of superhero conventions that sometimes play dumb and loose, like Mystery Men, and when convenient, serious and meditative like Watchmen

Vaughn is a little out of his depth here in caped-crusaderville, which makes it two times in a row (after the messy Stardust) that he’s been unable to jump cleanly into another genre.  And yet he’s got some fight in him.  Lest we forget that he produced Guy Ritchie’s first two scruffy Limey fun-fests, and then showed his own skill with his delicious-enuff Layer Cake. His command of fisticuffs is his bread and butter, and when he unleashes it in Kick-Ass, it… KICKS ASS (rated R style)!!!  It’s easy to lose interest with what’s going on in the first two Kick-Ass character-centric acts, but when the throwdown climax jazzed all up in our faces, the gripes found in the first paragraph disappeared quicker than the Detroit Lions come playoff time

So if Kick-Ass himself doesn’t kick-ass in Kick-Ass, who does?  Two characters who do deserve their own comic and movie, free of the chirpy cheese dripping in their path: father and daughter vigilantes Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.  Nicolas Cage IS Big Daddy and IS awesome.  His character’s a loose electrical wire, with a killer ‘stache, but Cage is somewhat restrained… well, at least when compared to his Big Easy over the top sleazy work in Bad Lt.  But the real draw here and overall is Chloë Moretz as Hit-Girl.  Every minute she’s on screen, she lights it up, and knocks us out.  And every minute she isn’t on screen, well, Kick-Ass could use a good kick in the ass, at the hand of her foot

Sealed With A Twiss: as in Deborah Twiss, and her mammoth mammaries, which are showcased (clothed, which sometimes is hotter than not) and drooled upon (not literally) in Kick-Ass

pee es – Sophie Wu aint so bad neither

Verdictgo: it’s all a hit with Hit-Girl, and there’s enuff of her in it to make this Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Ass rips it at a theater near jews this Friday

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…