You could argue that the rest of "Kick-Ass" is an elaborate excuse to turn a little girl into a punching bag, a lowering of an already inexcusably low bar.
Or you could argue that director Matthew Vaughn simply loses his footing at the end, and that for most of "Kick-Ass" his high-wire act does an impressively good job of balancing good fun and bad taste.
Since this newspaper just snagged a Pulitzer and we're all drunk on champagne, we'll go with the latter.
And give Vaughn his due - bubble-gum black comedy (from a Mark Millar comic) is a tough tone to manage, and he mostly hits the mark in "Kick-Ass."
The title character is a nerdy teen named Dave (Aaron Johnson), a comic-book freak and virgin (is that redundant?) who impulsively decides to sew his own costume and take to the streets.
He calls himself Kick-Ass, but gets his ass kicked. These days, of course, pathetic failure is no obstacle to fame, and when a cellphone video of his one-sided street fight goes viral, he becomes a celebrity - fluency in New Media dynamics is one way the movie shows its smarts.
"Kick-Ass" also understands comic-book physics - for every superhero, there is an equal and opposite villain, and Kick-Ass' fame inspires the son (Chris Mintz-Plasse) of a mob goon (Mark Strong) to create a corresponding adversary.
The movie's real wild card, though, is Hit Girl, a qualified ass-kicker who feels sorry for the inept Kick-Ass, and intervenes on his behalf - she bails him out at a drug dealer's lair in an explosion of cartoon violence (and music choices) that marks the movie's high point.
Once Hit Girl appears, the movie is hers, and we eagerly follow her own peculiar story, which has to do with her apprenticeship under a trainer-enabler-psycho father (Nic Cage).
