Kick-Ass **

Director: Matthew Vaughn
Cast: Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Chloë Moretz, Mark Strong
Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Yancy Butler, Lyndsy Fonseca
Clark Duke, Evan Peters, Michael Rispoli

Based on energy alone, Kick-Ass could very well ride a wave that would cloud the fact that it's a very inconsistent, almost incoherent, movie.
Its concept is quite a simple one, as it wonders why don't superheroes exist when practically anyone can become whatever they want.
The idea is executed by average teenager Dave Lizewski (Johnson) who buys himself a wetsuit, a couple of clubs and goes out to the streets looking for people to help using the name Kick-Ass.
"I always wondered why no one did it before me" he asks after he accidentally becomes an internet phenomenon and the threat of paranoid mob king Frank D'Amico (Strong, who's become the new go-to-guy for over the top villains) whose plans have been botched by a masked vigilante.
D'Amico ignores the fact that there are more heroes than Kick-Ass (giving the plot one of its first inconsistencies along with the constant disappearance of Dave's eyeglasses...) and one of them has a personal vendetta against him.
It's none other than Big Daddy (Cage) a once honored cop who fell victim to the mobster's allies and is now plotting a huge revenge against him, with his twelve year old daughter who calls herself Hit-Girl (Moretz).
Soon the heroes' storylines will cross as they face the evil D'Amico and the movie tries to be all of the following: a quirky indie like superhero movie, a Tarantino ripoff, an accurate social commentary on adolescents and the media, an old fashioned revenge story, a coming of age drama, a genre satire and a comedy of manners.
With all the different stylistic currents going through the movie, the real heroic feat is how director Vaughn manages to make something out of it and especially for that something to be vastly entertaining.
Much is owed to the superb cast who make the most out of the poor character development they're given.
Cage is at his idiosyncratic best (how he can be so good and then so terrible is a mystery) while Strong fills his role with morbid delight.
Yet the movie belongs to the young; Johnson, who technically has to carry the entire movie on his shoulders creates a charming hybrid of a Michael Cera performance with Daniel Radcliffe's unwilling blooming sexuality.
And the stunning Moretz, who also becomes the film's most controversial character, takes over the screen in such a way that you won't believe how young she actually is.
Her ability to be a complete bad-ass, yet preserve sweet, innocent traits is a remarkable work.
Too bad that it's especially with Hit-Girl that Vaughn reveals that he didn't really know how to handle the material.
For all the Tarantino-esque hyper-violence of the movie, there's also its pervading need to be as real as possible.
So in this tonal oxymoron, the film hits a contradiction that makes it impossible to take "serious" as a fantasy or as a fantastical take on reality.
Kick-Ass should've taken a cue from one of the basic paradigms of comic superheroes that make us wonder where will the villains who want to destroy the world move to.
This idea in comic books isn't usually taken seriously because we all know the hero will arrive in time to save the day, making the ultimate evil plan a complete implausibility.
But what can we make of a movie that constantly reminds us of the hero's ordinariness? If Dave's Kick-Ass isn't an actual superhero, what makes it alright to watch a little girl shooting gangsters?
The film tries to inhabit parallel universes: one where the comic book fantasy rules and even the youngest kids can be what they want and another completely different place where these very kids might want to be villains instead and pack guns in their lunchboxes to shoot their classmates.
Sometimes it's our world, sometimes it's superhero land...isn't this impossibility to differentiate between fantasy and reality what actually triggered several school massacres during the last decade?
Kick-Ass might be enjoyable but it gets wrong what a great superhero movie got very right: it has no consciousness of the responsibilities that come with power.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans ***

Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes
Val Kilmer, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Brad Dourif
Michael Shannon, Shawn Hatosy, Denzel Whitaker, Xzibit
Shea Wigham, Irma P. Hall, Tom Bower

Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Cage) is the kind of man that would drive a car from New Orleans to Biloxi, to deliver his father's (Bower) dog to his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Mendes) while taking care of a young crime witness (Whitaker) and snorting cocaine.
He is also the kind of man who gives Nicolas Cage the opportunity to ensue in the kind of deranged brilliance few actors can achieve like he does, when he's given the chance.
His performance is an exercise in excess and contradiction: while investigating a massacre Terence seems more frightened of a couple of iguanas than drug dealing thugs armed to their teeth.
He roams the Big Easy with a hunch (due to a spinal condition that keeps him in constant pain) and tells everyone to fuck themselves if they come in between him and his plans, which usually involve getting drugs or money to pay his bookies.
At one point his superior reminds him "you can not get away with that cowboy shit anymore", emphasis on the anymore as Herzog contemplates how the always decadent, but once glorious city fell under the wrath of Katrina and became a boiling pot for crime and corruption.
He's not talking about New Orleans exclusively but about a whole world that is becoming known for the evils that lurk in unexpected places always pushing the boundaries.
A world that's saying to us "think I can't get away with this?".
It's because of this world that an authority figure like Terence can get away with raping a girl while threatening her boyfriend with a gun and a drug lord (Xzibit) is suspected of trafficking but not murder.
Herzog fills his movie with red herrings that hook us as we become fascinated by Terence's behavior.
With Cage, the German iconoclast creates one of the funniest characters to come out in the past decade, all while paying tribute to a genre that's dying precisely because we know now that the good guys and heroes rarely come in uniforms.
Their vision of the world might not be optimistic, but sometimes we just have to take them in whatever shape they come in.