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100It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.
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100A ridiculously entertaining, perfectly paced, ultra-violent cinematic rush that kicks the places other movies struggle to reach.
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90Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.
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90Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure.
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88A 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.
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88Kick-Ass has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun.
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88The best superhero movie since "The Dark Knight" (and far less serious in tone or approach), Kick-Ass earns its name in every way.
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88Maybe I enjoyed the similarly themed Kick-Ass because it took me back to that innocent time. Or maybe it's because this is the most brazenly funny bloodbath unleashed on the public since "Pulp Fiction."
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83An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.
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83Director Matthew Vaughn has provided an imperfect but still wickedly hilarious take on Mark Millar's deconstruction of superhero mythos.
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Its balancing act between innocence and gore perfectly matches the expectations of genre fans, who should embrace the movie.
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80It's also perfectly content to be an insanely violent, funny take on an established genre. And in that respect, Kick-Ass lives up to its name.
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80For those of us who find somber superhero movies faintly ridiculous, Kick-Ass is a one-film justice league.
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80A clever movie premise based on an obscure comic book has been turned into, okay we'll say it, a fanboy's kick-ass wet dream of a movie that could be a surprise Spring smash.
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80With Kick-Ass, there are more cheap thrills, gory explosions and superheroes than a movie geek's YouTube mash-up.
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80This shrewd mixture of slick comic-book mayhem, unmistakable sweetness and ear-splitting profanity is poised to be a popular culture phenomenon because of its exact sense of the fantasies of the young male fanboy population.
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75The movie belongs to Moretz, whose sensational performance will be talked about for years. Her scenes with Cage, who wears a Batsuit and uses a voice borrowed from Adam West, are a hoot.
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75Kick-Ass reminds you of the great pleasures and thrills of superhero comics -- then turns everything you ever learned from comic books upside down.
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75It's irreverently entertaining.
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75Kick-Ass should delight fans of the original comics and garden-variety action junkies as well. Suggested subtitle: "Iron Man, You Just Got Served."
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75Irresponsible, morally murky, and batshit insane--in other words, Kick-Ass might be the most fun two hours you'll spend in a movie theater. It delivers the darkly comic laughs (the movie is clearly not taking itself too seriously, so you should do likewise) as well as the jaw-dropping action, but Kick-Ass's real accomplishment is bringing back the winkingly crazy Nic Cage we used to know and love.
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75Kick-Ass is some kind of twisted fun.
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75Kick-Ass is a rabid puppy of a movie, energetically bounding off the screen and into your lap, where it proceeds to chew off your face.
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70Kick-Ass is a compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos.
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70Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.
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A particularly timely story about civic-mindedness and the pursuit of fame. Along with a lot of potty-mouthed ass-kicking action.
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63Fusing teen comedy, bad-boy raunch, Tarantino-style gonzo mayhem, and tossing in a bloodthirsty little girl vigilante who swears like Steve Buscemi in a Coen brothers movie, the film has its moments of high-flying, low-down style. It's also nowhere near as subversive as it thinks it is.
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60Grungily stylish and often funny, at least for a while, though all of the caveats and contradictions that apply to Tarantino films apply here: One man's--or boy's--stylization is another's profane, unrelenting and tedious brutality.
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58Vaughn opts for comic-book bigness-big fights, big laugh lines, big explosions-but without a Spider-Man or Batman at the front of the action, Kick-Ass's heroes and villains look smaller-than-life in a larger-than-life world.
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50An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.
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50Vaughn did a cracking good caper film with a pre-007 Daniel Craig called "Layer Cake" six years ago, but Kick-Ass has little of that film's heady panache and instead batters you about the face and neck with wildly over-the-top fountains of gore, bone-cracking slow-motion, and, yes, Cage, who dials his acting down a few notches from the kicky Herzogian mindf---ery of "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans."
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Never as shocking as it thinks it is, as funny as it should be, or as engaged in cultural critique as it could be, Kick-Ass is half-assed.
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50Since Kick-Ass' whole premise is that comic-book violence, when enacted in real life, has real consequences, it seems a strange choice to layer Tarantino-style splatter onto the Y.A.-novel setting and play the whole thing for laughs.
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50The standard defense of such material is that we are watching "cartoon violence," but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer--that is, to coarsen and inflame?
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38It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."
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33Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.
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25Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let's say you're a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the move does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.
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20Kick-Ass - based on a graphic novel - thinks it's so brave and bold. But it's more like the title character, a dweeb who just thinks he's tough.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 161 out of 189
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Mixed: 12 out of 189
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Negative: 16 out of 189
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