It’s very rare that I come by a movie that has elements that would immediately turn me off of it come together to make a funny, fresh, and above all badass action movie. Let’s see: yet another superhero movie (yawn), starring actors who are in the same school/generation as Michael “I’ll Play George Michael Bluth Until The Day I Die” Cera, a high school comedy subplot, and a precocious child character whose father is played by Nicolas Cage, who was the object of my ire in The Wicker Man. I was very, very apprehensive about this movie. I walked in expecting to have a backlog of scathing comments about this film at the ready when I sat down to write the review; instead, the first thing I said as the credits rolled was “THAT WAS AWESOME”. Indeed it was.

I think the real triumph of this movie is that when the main character (the socially awkward, comic-obsessed teen-turned-amateur-superhero Dave, played by newcomer Aaron Johnson) Takes a Level in Badass (thank you, TVTropes), it’s from level 10 to level 15, not level 1 to level 70 (thank you, World of Warcraft). It’s a refreshingly realistic look at what would happen if a teenager with no training decided that he wanted to put on a mask and fight crime, and the fact that he has to go through untold beatings and failures to get to the level of badass he becomes makes him a far more interesting character than he would have been if he’d just instantly been a super-ninja-badass-fighter dude. The fact that he gets the living crap beaten out of him nearly the instant he decides to be a superhero doesn’t make Kick-Ass a cautionary tale against kids who want to make themselves extraordinary; it just shows that the road to becoming extraordinary isn’t easy.

The true standout in the whole movie, though, is Hit-Girl, played by Chloe Grace Moretz. The daughter of cop-turned-Batman-esque-superhero Big Daddy (played so well by Nicolas Cage that he is now restored to my good graces), Hit-Girl hacks, slashes, and shoots her way through the film with an intensity (and potty mouth to boot) that evokes Natalie Portman in The Professional. When she’s gleefully ordering several hundred-thousand dollar weapons off the internet or quite handily slashing open the chests of her enemies with a massive blade-staff, I feel a twinge of sadness because I’m seven years older than she is and nowhere near as awesome, both when I was eleven and now. Truth be told, Hit-Girl is the real star of this movie. Aaron Johnson does an admirable job as the title character, but his sensitive, witty portrayal of a wimpy kid who just wants to be badass doesn’t stand a chance against the juggernaut that is Moretz. I hope to see more badassery from her in the future.

The other major surprise and one of the best elements in this movie is its effective balance of light and dark. All too often, modern comic book movies tend to draw from the Frank Miller/Alan Moore school of comic book heroes: gritty, deconstructed beyond belief, and very pessimistic. Not to say that this is a bad thing; after years of camp (and Schumacher’s Batman and Robin…excuse me while I shudder), superheroes needed to get a little more down and dirty and more realistic, and dark and gritty can be done stunningly well, as seen in The Dark Knight trilogy. But I’m also starting to get tired of the inky cloaks every hero and their mother seems to be wearing these days. What makes Kick-Ass so successful is that it has gritty and realistic elements without being dark and gloomy, and it has the color and fun of the superhero movies of old without being campy or silly. For this, Kick-Ass joins the ranks of Iron Man of a superhero movie that doesn’t insult your intelligence or leave you feeling depressed in the end. It also handled the high school comedy subplot (which perhaps it could have done without) admirably; while it wasn’t completely necessary to the movie as a whole, it didn’t detract from the more, well, kick-ass A plot, and it helped to provide a backdrop for the rise of Kick-Ass from average high schooler to internet sensation/superhero.

The other plot element that could have easily fallen flat was Dave/Kick-Ass using new media (YouTube and MySpace) to spread his fame. Most of the time, when the evil men in the suits who run the movie companies and cancel all of Joss Whedon’s shows try to include into film newfangled things that the kids are all into like the internets, it just comes off as pandering and condescending. Here, it actually serves to comment on the viral nature of fame and, as disturbingly rendered in a scene where Kick-Ass tries to fight a bunch of gangsters, a new kind of Kitty Genovese Syndrome. The onlookers at the fight whips out their phones—not to call 911—but to film and take pictures of the kid in the scuba suit trying to stop criminals from beating another man. And even though the movie pretty clearly showed how stupid the onlookers are, I didn’t feel like I was getting beaten over the head. Heavens! Could this be a social commentary that’s…SUBTLE? The horrors!

I think the movies I love the most are the ones that pleasantly surprise me with how well they worked: Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and now Kick-Ass. I go in unsure of how a filmmaker could pull off an adaptation of something with so many opportunities to go wrong, and then I come out of the theater cheering. Kick-Ass is by far one of my top movies for this year (well, the cynic in me is saying that there are still 8 months to go, but for now, at least, Kick-Ass is up there): a realistic, yet still fun superhero movie that deconstructs the idea of the ordinary teen becoming a hero, and then builds it right back up again with mind-blowingly awesome action sequences. It’s…well, kick-ass.