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USA: David Fincher, 1995; IMDB

Original title: Flickan som lekte med elden
Sweden/Denmark/Germany: Daniel Alfredson, 2009; IMDB

USA: David Twohy, 2009; IMDB

UK/USA: Matthew Vaughn, 2010; IMDB

KICK-ASS really didn't grab me in the way that it did some people. It's quite funny. It's quite exciting. It's quite observant. It's a lot of "quite", but it never really comes together to form a single cohesive whole. Tonally it's all over the place, and when you look at the credits - three editors, four music composers - this is perhaps no surprise. It's just never quite sure what it wants to be, and the result is that you end up with a whole lot of extraneous elements all vying for attention. You've got a clumsy character journey (the usual "to be a superhero you just have to believe in yourself" guff), a tacked-on romance subplot (it's telling that, once the final act gets underway, the love interest is completely forgotten about), and the fact that the film seems to start out as a send-up of the superhero genre before, in the second half, just devolving into a generic superhero movie.

As for the much-vaunted Hit Girl, once you get over the fact that you're watching a kid saying bad words and killing people, you start to realise that Chloë Moretz's performance isn't really all that great. Also, while the fact that director Matthew Vaughn financed the entire project himself is an achievement not to be sniffed at, a lot of the CGI and green-screen work is painfully bad, the film's ambition exceeding its budget on a number of occasions.

There's a lot to like in KICK-ASS, and I get the feeling there are two or three great movies in there just itching to get out. The problem is it lacks something to bring it all together, and as a result I ultimately walked away from it feeling unfulfilled.

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