Kick-Ass

Empire Chris Hewitt

A ridiculously entertaining, perfectly paced, ultra-violent cinematic rush that kicks the places other movies struggle to reach.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.

Time Richard Corliss

Kick-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.

Variety Joe Leydon

Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The best superhero movie since "The Dark Knight" (and far less serious in tone or approach), Kick-Ass earns its name in every way.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

Maybe 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."

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Kick-Ass has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun.

New York Post Kyle Smith

A 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.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Director Matthew Vaughn has provided an imperfect but still wickedly hilarious take on Mark Millar's deconstruction of superhero mythos.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond

A 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.

Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf

For those of us who find somber superhero movies faintly ridiculous, Kick-Ass is a one-film justice league.

Arizona Republic Bill Goodykoontz

It'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.

The Hollywood Reporter John Defore

Its balancing act between innocence and gore perfectly matches the expectations of genre fans, who should embrace the movie.

Salon.com Vadim Rizov

With Kick-Ass, there are more cheap thrills, gory explosions and superheroes than a movie geek's YouTube mash-up.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

This 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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The 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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Kick-Ass is some kind of twisted fun.

USA Today Claudia Puig

It's irreverently entertaining.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Kick-Ass should delight fans of the original comics and garden-variety action junkies as well. Suggested subtitle: "Iron Man, You Just Got Served."

Premiere Nick Starkey

Irresponsible, 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.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Kick-Ass reminds you of the great pleasures and thrills of superhero comics -- then turns everything you ever learned from comic books upside down.

St. Petersburg Times Steve Persall

Kick-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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Joe

A particularly timely story about civic-mindedness and the pursuit of fame. Along with a lot of potty-mouthed ass-kicking action.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Kick-Ass is a compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Fusing 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.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Grungily 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.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Vaughn 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.

Slate Dana Stevens

Since 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.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The 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?

Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore

An awkward blend of ultra-realistic violence, boundaries-bending satire and low comedy.

Village Voice Karina Longworth

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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Vaughn 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."

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It may well be a hit, but me, I'm waiting for "Iron Man 2."

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Critics 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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Will 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.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

Kick-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.