Kick-Ass

Spanks - 5

Director - Matthew Vaughn

Writers - Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn

Starring - Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Lyndsy Fonseca, Nicolas Cage & Chloe Grace Moretz

Release Date - 16 April 2010

MPAA Rating - R

Kick-Ass is the first superhero/comic book movie to be released this summer movie season. However, Kick-Ass is not your typical superhero film. Most superhero and/or comic book movies are rated PG-13 or even sometimes PG and Kick-Ass is rated R. Like any superhero movie, it isn't to be taken seriously.

The film is based on comic written by Mark Millar and is set in a world without superheroes. Dave Lizewski, a normal New York City teenager who hangs out reading comic books has always wondered why nobody has ever become a superhero. He makes a costume, makes a MySpace page and sets out to save New Yorkers and calls himself Kick-Ass. When Kick-Ass tries to help his school crush by telling a drug dealer to leave her alone he meets Hit-Girl and watches her kill all the "bad guys" in the apartment, and gets pulled into something way over his head.

There is a lot of controversy going around about the large amount of violence, gore, the bad language and Hit-Girl. Unlike Batman or Iron Man, the violence is not toned down and is very bloody. Every major character "curses like a sailor". The biggest of them all is the character of Hit Girl played by Chloe Grace Moretz. This is because of the language she uses (words like the ones that rhyme with sock and hunt) and the gratuitous violence (guns, knives, swords fights) and body count that her character racks up (I lost count at 6 and that was in Hit-Girls first scene) because she was 13 years old at the world premiere.

If you are not a fan of violence or bad language, this movie is not for you (go see Date Night instead). Controversy aside, since people just love to complain at everything on TV and on the silver screen, the film is funny, entertaining, and action packed. It is everything you can ask for in a superhero movie and Matthew Vaughn has done it better then most. Just remember, as Chloe Grace Moretz said "It's a movie and it’s not real"

Sherlock Holmes

Spanks - 3

Director - Guy Ritchie

Writer - Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg

Starring - Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong & Eddie Marsan

Release Date - 25 December 2009

MPAA Rating - PG-13

Sherlock Holmes has been adapted into films over 200 times since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first print appearance in 1887. This is Holmes' the first appearance in a major motion picture in the 2000s (that I can recall). The film is not your normal Hollywood origin story. The film begins with Holmes and Watson being introduced by solving a case involving a serial killer. Cut to a few months later and we find out Watson is getting married and Holmes gets his next case, the case the movie follows.

Being a film by Guy Richie, I expected a lot of crazy twist and plot developments you come to expect from a Richie film. But being the film wasn't written by him, you get generic plot development and little suspense. I hope the planned sequel is written with a lot more input from Richie and takes more of what he has done brilliantly in the films he has written and directed previously.

If you go without the expectations I had for it, it is probably a good movie. The people I saw it with enjoyed it a lot. I thought the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer was different sounding and amazing. The design team did a good job recreating London in the 1890s. Robert Downey Jr. brings Holmes to live as well as he did with Tony Stark. Everything was in the right place for Sherlock Holmes to be a great film, but it shows in this film how a wrong story can mess up everything.