Kick-Ass (2010)
- To accurately portray their role in Kick-Ass, Aaron Taylor-Johnson spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Matthew Vaughn.
- Kick-Ass utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Matthew Vaughn.
Kick-Ass is a 2010 British-American superhero comedy film directed by Matthew Vaughn, based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. The film follows Dave Lizewski, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an ordinary, unremarkable New York City teenager who decides to become a real-life superhero despite having no special abilities, training, or equipment — just a scuba suit and a naive sense of justice. After his first attempts at crime-fighting go disastrously wrong and a video of his beating goes viral, Dave as "Kick-Ass" becomes an internet sensation, drawing the attention of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl — a father-daughter vigilante team played by Nicolas Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz — who are waging a genuine, lethal war against a local crime boss.
Chloë Grace Moretz's performance as Hit-Girl, an 11-year-old assassin who dispatches criminals with brutal efficiency while dropping profanity-laced one-liners, was the film's most controversial and celebrated element. Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy, deliberately channeling Adam West's Batman in his vocal delivery, was a darkly comic portrayal of parental obsession taken to psychotic extremes. Matthew Vaughn self-financed the film after studios balked at the violence involving child characters.
Kick-Ass earned $96 million worldwide on a $30 million budget and sparked significant debate about the appropriateness of extreme violence involving minors in entertainment, though defenders argued the film was a deliberate satire of superhero power fantasies.
