Lucy reviews ... Kick-[REDACTED]

I've run into a little problem.  See, I'm not allowed to swear, but the movie I am about to review for you has a swear word in the title.  So when I was dictating this review to daddy, I told him to go ahead and edit it as he saw fit.  I'm apologizing in advance if this causes any confusion.

To intelligently discuss Kick-[REDACTED], you have to understand how it was made, and why it is a small miracle that the film is even playing in theaters right now.  See, no studio would touch the script with a ten foot pole.  Some outright rejected it.  Others wanted to make the characters older or water down the violence.  Instead of giving in to these idiots, director Matthew Vaughn independently financed the movie outside the broken studio system.  And then sold the final product back to them once test audiences started going nuts for it. 

So what's Kick-[REDACTED] about?  It's the story of teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) and his decision to become a superhero (codename: Kick-[REDACTED]) despite the fact that he has no powers.  It's also the story of Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (played by a delightfully wacky Nicolas Cage), a ruthless crimefighting father-daughter duo out to take down a local crime boss.

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with this movie, and the fact that none of them did is a testament to Matthew Vaughn.  He knows when to ease off the campiness and have something genuinely shocking happen.  The man manages to get a good performance out of Nicolas Cage, for God's sake.  That guy's been mailing it in for years.  But in Kick-[REDACTED], he infuses Big Daddy with genuine emotional depth and a truly bizarre Adam West-like quirkiness.  How can you cheer for a guy who has essentially raised his 11 year old daughter in a way that allows her to crush a guy in giant trash compactor?  He's pretty much robbed this girl of a childhood and turned her into a relentless killing machine named Hit Girl, yet we still empathize with him. 

And then there's Kick-[REDACTED] himself--an awkward, sort of annoying teenager with some sort of deranged desire to fight crime.  It seems like he's not really that into the whole truth and justice thing--he just wants to be a superhero for the sake of being a superhero.  What kind of person does that?  A slighly unbalanced one, that's who. Yet we care about this weirdo, and we can't help but get a little bit nervous every time he puts on his gear.  In the world of Kick-[REDACTED], it's a genuine possibility that this loser is going to get the crap beat out of him and a knife in the gut.  In fact, that actually happens early on in the movie.

What's even more amazing is that this uneasiness about the well-being of Kick-[REDACTED] and Hit Girl continues throughout the WHOLE movie.  Just as you get used to the idea that Hit Girl is pretty much unstoppable, she gets into a brutal fistfight and you all of a sudden remember that she's an 11 year old girl who, without her kitana blades and guns, is not a physical match for a grown man. 

So should you see it?  Well, let me ask you this.  Are you American?  Are you a bed-wetting, politically correct namby-pamby?  If your answers to those questions are yes and no, respectively, then you should see Kick-[REDACTED].  It's unapologetically fun, and it is hard evidence that movie-making can still be fun.

Want to get a taste of what Kick-[REDACTED] is all about?  Just check out this clip featuring a nice father-daughter moment between Big Daddy and Hit Girl:

 

Matthew Vaughn has found himself a genuine star in Chloe Moretz.  Watching this 11 year old girl cut her way through a room full of thugs with nothing but a kitana blade is more fun than anything I've seen on screen in years. 

In fact, Hit Girl is my new hero.  I asked my daddy if I could be Hit Girl for Halloween, and he said yes.  We haven't broken the news to mommy yet.  As far as she's concerned, I'm still going as Elizabeth Lambert, a truly great soccer player for New Mexico State: