Kick-Ass

The British movie industry produces many comic kids' adventures, and Kick-Ass (2010) is one of the more successful. It grossed US$20 million at the USA box office, which isn't fantastic given that the action-fantasy tale of a teenage superhero is set in New York (albeit on location mostly in Toronto) and its British cast members cuss profanely in American accents.

Incompetent wannabe superhero Dave (aka Kick-Ass) is well played by former child star Aaron (Shanghai Knights) Johnson, a young Brit whose John Lennon (Nowhere Boy) proved his coming-of-age as an adult actor (and led to his gossip-magazine-fodder affair with its older female director). He wears a green mail-order hero's outfit.

His rival/nemesis is Red Mist (Christopher Superbad Mintz-Plasse, a Californian), a wannabe villain in red leather and ghoulish black face paint. He's eager to help his evil father and supergangster, for whom the obvious casting choice was UK filmdom's baddie-of-the-century, Mark Strong, an Italian-German Irishman who added much to Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes.

There has to be a female interest, other than Dave's female friend at school, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca, a former child star and half-Portuguese Californian who made 84 episodes of The Young and the Restless). She links up with Kick-Ass because she thinks he's gay. The real superheroine is Hit-Girl, a little poppet who wears a purple wig and utters "cunts" in one of her fighting moods (Chloe Moretz, born 1997 in Atlanta and a veteran TV actress). Her guiding light is her father, Big Daddy, a vengeful ex-cop, giving Nicolas Cage a neat cameo role as a mousy bespectacled teacher of gory killing techniques.

A comic book inspired the screenplay by director-producer Matthew Vaughn and his fellow-Brit creative partner, Jane Goldman. A TV producer, she'd worked with Vaughn previously on their failed franchise, Stardust. Vaughn himself is the stuff that gossip magazines are made of; his Wikipedia bio is almost too stereotypically Brit-eccentric to be believable.

His surname came from his supposed father, US actor Robert (Magnificent Seven, Man from U.N.C.L.E.) Vaughn, but he and his actress mother found out, when he was a teenager, that his real inseminator had been a minor aristocrat, George de Vere Drummond. One could guess that Vaughn (a PhD, active Democrat and Emmy winner) had grown tired of denying his parental role; lawsuits and DNA tests were resorted to in California but Vaughn Jr kept his given name.

Dropping out of university quickly in the UK, Vaughn went to Hollywood. At 25, he was back in the UK, co-producing his first movie, Innocent Sleep (a London hitman doucdrama starring Michael Gambon). A great friend was Guy Richie; together they directed (Richie) and produced (Vaughn) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a gangland romp that earned them fortunes. Their next teamwork was on Snatch, a successful pan-Atlantic gangland hoot starring Brad Pitt with a bizarre accent, and Swept Away, a disastrous re-make for Richie's then wife, Madonna.

Richie's marital star-shooting may have inspired Vaughn's own choice of a wife (2002): German supermodel Claudia Schiffer. Three children later (one bearing his real father's name), they are presumably still together, because Kick-Ass includes a lengthy plug for Claudia cosmetics. One of the movie's producers is Brad Pitt, and gossip-magazine devotees might be able to describe another 66 degrees of filmdom non-separation between all the players.

Kick-Ass 2 is already in production, with the same trio of teenage superheroes. They are fun, but can their story develop now that both the charismatic evil dads have been killed off. One burned to death, the other got shot into space by a bazooka: Kick-Ass ain't subtle and Spiderman need not fear this cheapjack competition.