Delighted

There is a code in the movie biz that says that if you have the makings of a great film, with a brilliant script based on a truly daring concept, and your movie has any sort of significant budget, then highly paid people wearing suits will show up on your set and proceed to destroy your film. They won’t know they are destroying it. Rather, they will be “helping”.

They will tell you to shave down the offensive bits, to dumb down those parts that assume the audience is intelligent, to replace your highly resonant character-driven narrative by a mechanical wind-up plot that they think will sell better.

Somehow, miraculously, none of these things were done to “Kick Ass”, which I just saw this evening. In defiance of every rule of big budget filmmaking, this one somehow got out alive, with all of its beauty, humor, violence and glorious insanity left entirely intact.

The real hero here is the film’s creator, Matthew Vaughn, who refused studio financing when every studio he approached insisted on changing the film to make it more “normal”. He went the far more difficult route of raising money independently.

The result is one of the best films I’ve seen in years — perhaps ever. Go see it as soon as it comes to your part of the world.

By the way, in a film filled with great performances, eleven year old Chloë Grace Moretz is simply astonishing, in a role which breaks rules that haven’t even been written yet. If your heart does not sing with sheer rapturous delight every moment she is on screen, then there is something seriously wrong with you.