Kick-Ass

In the early 1990s, Mark Lawson published Bloody Margaret, three "political fantasies" satirising the cultural legacy of the Thatcher years. The briefest, most potent, "Teach Yourself American in Seven Days", centred on a young City banker who had created a personal world so hermetic and Americanised in its language, food, entertainment and behaviour that he didn't need to step outside it to feel he was in the States.

How prophetic he turned out to be about the ersatz, virtual reality Britain in which we live and what could be more representative of it than Kick-Ass, a British action movie with an archetypal American title, set entirely in America, shot at Pinewood and Elstree with locations in Toronto, based on a graphic novel by a British author (Mark Millar), and performed by a seamless Anglo-American cast.

You could say that it's been done before. In the 1940s, for instance, George Orwell writing of James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, was astonished that "the whole book, récit as well as dialogue, is written in the American language", while the author, "an Englishman who has (I believe) never been to the United States, seems to have made a complete mental transference to the American underworld".

But James Hadley Chase was just one man. Kick-Ass is, to borrow the title of one of its director's productions, lock, stock and two smoking barrels, the work of British film-makers, co-scripted by its director Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, who previously collaborated on Stardust, a feeble fantasy located nowhere in particular.

Set in New York, Kick-Ass is a variation on a superhero tale of the kind that has been a cinematic staple in B-movie and serial form for 70 years, and in big-budget special effects form since Christopher Reeve's Superman of 1978. The twist is that the teenage hero, Dave Lizewski (played by the British actor Aaron Johnson, who recently impersonated the young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy), comes from a blue-collar background and has neither the wealth of Bruce Wayne nor the special powers of the likes of Peter Parker, the lad who turns himself into Spider-Man. "My only superpower is being invisible to girls," he observes wryly. Dave's steeped in comic books, which he pores over with his mates and suddenly conceives the idea of becoming a superhero without superpowers.

In this, though he doesn't know it, he's returning to the origins of the genre. The charismatic scourge of injustice with a hidden day-to-day identity was invented by Baroness Orczy in the early 20th century. Her Percy Blakeney/Scarlet Pimpernel came via the figure of the masked avenger Zorro in the 1920s to become the American comic strip heroes of the late Depression.

Dave is also trying what was attempted 11 years ago in Mystery Men, a moderately amusing spoof on superhero pictures in which a variety of sad, working-class figures invent secret personae, William H Macy, for instance, being Shoveler. But it lacked the ferocious energy and ruthlessness of Kick-Ass.

From an opening shot, in which a mentally disturbed, would-be superhero plunges to his death from a skyscraper, Kick-Ass is relentlessly violent. People are crushed alive in car compactors and blown up in giant microwaves. Dave, having equipped himself with a mail-order suit to become Kick-Ass, has an encounter with two vicious delinquents that puts him into hospital and turns him half-bionic with metal bits in his joints.

The real violence, however, comes when his benevolent activities coincide with the revenge trip of an aggrieved ex-cop, Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage), and his 11-year-old daughter, Mindy (the precociously accomplished Chloë Grace Moretz). This truly professional pair, a parody of a soppy American father-daughter relationship, are a Batman and Robin duo. He's Big Daddy, she, with a purple wig, leather jacket, mask and miniskirt, is Hit Girl, and they kill people in graphically colourful ways using an arsenal of weapons that would have Dick Grayson's eyes bulging. But instead of Robin's boyish slang, Mindy is the foulest mouthed child ever to appear on screen, making Louis Malle's Zazie sound like Colette.

The Macreadys are targeting gang boss and drug baron Frank D'Amico (the excellent Mark Strong, who rarely plays British characters nowadays) and his thugs (most of them British actors) who wrongly believe that Kick-Ass, an accidental hero of the internet, is their nemesis. This being a family movie, it falls to D'Amico's spoilt son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to pose as superhero Red Mist to trap Dave.

The mayhem is nonstop. The morality of the old Detective Comics strips that over the years developed from simple decency to metaphysical complexity is here dispensed with. Cruel and unusual punishments are the order of the day, along with associated methods of interrogation of the kind that received Dick Cheney's seal of approval. (Should someone write a book called "The Panorama of American Horror: Lon Chaney to Dick Cheney"?) Exuding confidence in the jokey bond it shares with the audience, the movie is extremely knowing in its appeal to connoisseurs of comic strips and video games.

The self-referentiality even extends to a giant poster of the director's wife, Claudia Schiffer (photo by Mario Testino), which may possibly be intended to evoke the poster of Anita Ekberg in From Russia With Love. Though it's not clear what's left to be said, the picture ends with an invitation to a sequel and surely one will follow.

In his 1944 essay, Orwell, in switching from his classic comparison of the very English tale of the gentleman thief AJ Raffles to the violently American No Orchids for Miss Blandish, remarked, somewhat excessively: "Now for a header into the cesspool." After the ersatz Kick-Ass, I'm reminded of an old joke about Hitler trying to revive public morale in the last days of the Third Reich through a crash programme of turning excrement into butter. Eventually, his scientists produce a substance that has the appearance, the consistency and the nutrient qualities of butter. "So vot is the problem?" a furious Hitler demands. "Vell, mein Führer," says an anxious scientist, "it still smells and tastes just like shit."