For a comic supposedly based on the idea of what would happen if people really decided to don costumes and fight crime, Kick-Ass feels unrealistically cruel and filled with disdain for superheroes, comic book fans and mankind in general. Big Daddy is a right-wing nut whose police detective background is a fiction used to manipulate and brainwash his kidnapped daughter into following his delusional fanboy fantasies. In these comics, Dave is mostly pathetic, his desire to become a superhero more of a symptom of isolation than a concern for others, and his relationship with Katie, an immensely unlikable caricature of a high-school mean girl, is stalker-ish and creepy.

The comic is mean-spirited, fueled by an attempt at edginess measured in casual racism, sexism and spitefulness, issues that are only exacerbated in the comic’s sequel volumes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big fan of Millar’s Kick-Ass comic series, which hit the stands two years before the movie. While this has certainly worked in his favor in terms of comic sales, the critical reception of these works has been a mixed bag. He’s a writer who likes to push buttons and push comic book concepts into the realm of taboo. Millar has proven to be a controversial writer over his career, in part because of his reliance on shock value. But the success of Vaughn’s film, co-written by his frequent collaborator Jane Goldman, and its emergence as a modern cult classic has less to do with the amount of blood spilt and profanities issued from the mouth of Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) than it does with the emotional sincerity of the pic.

While we’ve become all too familiar with colorful comic-book movie characters dropping f-bombs and straddling the line between expertly choreographed action and gross-out comedy, thanks to the likes of Deadpool and Harley Quinn, Kick-Ass set the bar and has yet to be surpassed. Based on the creator-owned Icon comic series by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., Kick-Ass follows high-schooler Dave Lizewski, an avid comic book fan who decides to stop dreaming of becoming a superhero and actually become one, which not only puts him on the radar of other costumed heroes, but the mob. It’s been a decade since filmmaker Matthew Vaughn delivered his ultra-violent, teen comedy take on superheroes with Kick-Ass. “With no power comes no responsibility, except that wasn’t true,” Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) says as he contemplates his future as a superhero, a brief career that’s already left its bruises, physical reminders of the consequences this lifestyle has, badges of honor for what this lifestyle can mean.

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