This film, Kick Ass, which we belatedly saw this afternoon, has left me perplexed and bemused. It is well made, well directed (Matthew Vaughn), tightly plotted, well acted and quite funny in places.  It is also full of filthy language and quite extreme violence and a key part is played by an eleven year-old vigilante girl (Mindy Macready/Hit Girl, played very well by Chloë Grace Moretz) who dispatches the villains, murderers of her parents, with great aplomb and liberal quantities of gore. Nicholas Cage (as Damon Macready/Big Daddy) turns in a suitably creepy performance as her father. Irritatingly, the closing scene quite deliberately sets up a possible sequel and the solid box office figures are probably encouraging the studio to think about that right now. But I just didn’t get the point of it. The everyman anti-hero, Dave Lizewski/Kick Ass (played by Aaron Johnson), fails in his suicidally futile fightback and can only be helped by a series of ‘with-one-bound-he-was-free’ twists to the plot (for example, a car accident damages his nerves and raises his pain threshold). So what’s the message, if there is one? Don’t try this at home, kids?