I can’t have existence invisible. But can I kick Spidey’s ass? Aaron Johnson as Kick-Ass. Photograph: Daniel Smith
Now that the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man days are officially over, bloggers and tabloid journalists alike possess been speculating freely over who will play the webslinger in Spider-Man 4, the reboot to be directed by (500 Days) of Summer’s Marc Webb. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a clear frontrunner, given his worthy of noted praise track record with Webb, and he looks like he might be interested. For me, 500 Days was a surprisingly cerebral and offbeat romantic comedy, and there can have been small in number better realised sequences in film-making last year than the pitch-perfect segue in the park in what one. Gordon-Levitt celebrates bedding Zooey Deschanel with a tightly choreographed song and dance number that sees him slowly joined by more and more members of the public. Nevertheless, producers of the commencing Spider-Man film plan to take Peter Parker back to high school, and at 28 Gordon-Levitt might virtuous be a little old to play a teenager.
The dread names of Zac Efron and Robert Pattinson have been bandied about without much conviction, but I’d be surprised to see the role action to like famous faces. Efron was pretty decent in Me and Orson Welles, but the series doesn’t need a big name to pull in the box position dollars – just a great storyline and a return to the smooth however zippy execution of the first two films. Pattinson? Well I think we already had emo Spidey in the third instalment, which didn’t exactly work out. Besides, the idea of a swaggering, narcissistic Peter Parker makes my blood run devoid of warmth, and I’ve seen little prove that the British actor is capable of much greater degree of than that.
It would be premature to recommend that Spider-Man has run its conduct: with quite his emotional tics and neuroses, Peter Parker is similar a hugely kind, engaging character that in that place will always be a town for him in the hearts of comic-book fans. Yet I do sort of wonder whether we’re looking in the wrong place for our next fix of this kind of bright and breezy all-American fare. I was successful plenty to catch an early screening of Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughan’s forthcoming adaptation of the little-known John Romita Jr comic book, last month, a movie that could well make Sony’s series redundant at what time it arrives in April. It is, to all intents and purposes, the indie Spidey.
While I can’t say too much about the film, which is still in a state of being liable to embargo, I can tell you that it’s a snappy, ebullient unite of the best bits from Spider-Man, Watchmen and Superbad. And it really is that good. Check out the latest trailer, although to be frank, it doesn’t really do the movie equity.
Fortunately, you don’t have to have caught Kick-Ass to be able to see that Vaughan is aiming for a hyper-modern catch of fish on the like territory as Spider-Man 4. The new film updates an aesthetic which is stuck firmly in the relatively conservative early 1960s, Spider-Man’s heyday.
Both comic books centre on a geeky teen who finds himself becoming a hero, yet Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) doesn’t have the ability to creep walls, swing from one side skyscrapers or shoot sticky material from his forearms. In fact he doesn’t regard any powers at all. The first time he heads out to unsheathe the sword infraction of law he winds up in hospital for divers weeks following a severe beating by a group of thugs. When he eventually gets out, rumours break ground to disseminate at school that all those bruises are the result of his regular forays into male prostitution. He is subsequently adopted by the school hottie as the gay BFF she has always wanted.
There are more contemporary touches. After verdict fame on YouTube, Dave sets up a MySpace account in order to make contact with people that need help, and the toughest hero in this universe is a 12-year-old girl experienced by her father to take on criminals, who she removes from the print with a bloodthirsty glee while swearing like a trooper. Frankly, this is not the sort of material Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee would ever acquire been likely to put his name to. The movie version is going to make Spider-Man look like an antiquated relic of a past era.
Of course, in that place’s a danger that with so many anachronistic flavours, Kick-Ass could look extremely dated in 15 years’ time, but it right at that time it looks fresher than anything else out there, wouldn’t you agree?
