Like an explosion in a bad taste factory, Matthew Vaughn's teen-superhero black comedy Kick-Ass is a thoroughly outrageous, jaw-droppingly violent and very funny riff on the quasi-porn world of comic books – except that there is absolutely no "quasi-" about it. Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman have adapted a comic-book series by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr by crushing the essence of Kill Bill, Spider-Man and Ghostbusters to create something fantastically anarchic and gloriously irresponsible: a surrealist fantasy of adolescent wish-fulfilment and fear, sploshed on to the screen in poster-paint colours.
In its monumentally mad and addled way, Kick-Ass might even be saying something about the ethics of civilians "having a go" at criminals, about teenagers getting bullied and about our brave new world of homemade internet celebrity. And between them, Vaughn and Goldman show a genius for incorrectness and pure provocation: an entire edition or perhaps an entire series of Radio 4's Moral Maze might have to be devoted to the extraordinary action sequence in which a prepubescent superheroine called Hit Girl, in mask and purple wig, boldly denounces a dozen bad guys with the c-word before letting them have it with the gleaming "Benchmade model-42 butterfly knife" she has just got from her adoring father for her 11th birthday. And all this to a cranked-up version of the Banana Splits theme tune on the soundtrack. What I experienced was not so much a moral panic, as a full-scale gibbering fit in the stalls.
At the centre of the story is a New York high-school kid and comic-book obsessive called Dave Lizewski, played by the British up-and-comer Aaron Johnson, who has just portrayed the young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Dave is obsessed with the great conundrum of our time: why has no one yet actually tried to be a superhero, for real? (In the counter-history of Watchmen, cops became masked vigilantes to whack villains who evaded the law; some wacky aspirants tried it in the comic series and 1999 film Mystery Men.) So Dave orders an incredibly uncool green-and-yellow ski suit and mask from the internet, and paces around the New York streets, under his new name, Kick-Ass. Inevitably, he is half-killed by the very first baddies he attempts to confront and, in the back of the ambulance, begs the bemused paramedics to hide his shameful costume, leading to rumours in school that his body was found naked, and that he is therefore gay. Weirdly, this new metrosexual image gives poor Dave status in school with the super-hot Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) who likes the idea of a gay best friend. His self-esteem improbably climbing, Kick-Ass takes to the streets once again, where he finds himself protected by real superheroes: the 11-year-old Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) and her doting father Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), a masked avenger in the style of Christopher Nolan's Batman. They are fighting the good fight against a creepy crimelord Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong) whose own nerdy son also longs to be a superhero. This is Chris, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse as a variation of his legendary McLovin character from Superbad.
The unlikely triumph of Kick-Ass is that, for a microsecond, it presents a plausible scenario in which an amateur superhero might somehow actually succeed, and like Galaxy Quest with its collision of phoney and real space aliens, Kick-Ass fantasises about a meeting of wannabe and real superheroes. Bruce Wayne's superpower was money: Dave Lizewski's is unembarrassability. His nerve-endings are a little shot from his initial beating, but he is cushioned more by a sublime lack of irony. When he walks around in the silly outfit and suicidally takes on another crew of villains, it isn't long before a stunned crowd of onlookers are videoing the punch-up – and Kick-Ass survives just long enough for the bad guys to be hobbled by the thought of their imminent appearance on YouTube, battling a crazy guy in a superhero outfit. It could incriminate them, but more importantly it will make them look stupid. So they back down. Kick-Ass, with an unconscious talent for divining the zeitgeist, has made the powers of the internet work for him: YouTube makes him a star, and his MySpace page builds his career. Peter Parker may have been bitten by a radioactive spider, but Dave has been bitten by the web celebrity bug. In the old days, Clark Kent and Peter Parker took work on newspapers, because that was how they found out where the action was. That was old media. Kick-Ass uses the online world to self-publish his superheroism.
In parallel with the bizarre and chaotic adventures of Kick-Ass, Big Daddy is mentoring and generally home-schooling Hit Girl in the ways of crime-fighting. The education she gets does look horribly like abuse, especially when she smilingly submits to being shot by her father, as a way of getting used to a bullet-proof vest, and also as part of the wholesome toughening-up process. (There is a very similar scene in Matteo Garrone's Neapolitan mob drama Gomorrah.) The sheer bad taste is what gives the comedy its super-power.
Perhaps I shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did: but with more energy and satire and craziness in its lycra-gloved little finger than other films have everywhere else, Kick-Ass is all pleasure and no guilt.