McLovin to ‘Kick-Ass’ in Violent Teen Action Movie

Sure, they’ve made musicals starring kids (High School Musical). They’ve made romantic comedies starring kids (Little Manhattan). They’ve even made Dangerous Liaisons starring kids (Cruel Intentions). But why hasn’t Hollywood made a violent, profane action movie starring kids? Thankfully, now they are — and McLovin is playing the villain.

Director Matthew Vaughn is apparently so excited about adapting Mark Millar’s comic Kick-Ass to the screen that, when studios rejected it — worried about releasing a movie with a bunch of teenagers beating each other with baseball bats and dropping F-bombs — he raised the $30 million budget himself. The comic, about an ordinary lonely high schooler who puts on a superhero suit and tries to fight crime — with disastrous consequences — starts out with its dork hero bloodied and tied to a chair, electrodes wired to his testicles, and just gets crazier from there.

What makes us think this might be something more than exploitative trash? (It’ll definitely be exploitative trash, but maybe also something more, we mean.) The casting of Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the Red Mist, the son of a mobster who faces off against the would-be superhero. Just seeing McLovin in this movie in all his dweeb-turned-player glory is going to remind us that when we were teens, we would’ve viewed the notion of Kick-Ass — a surely R-rated movie about a lonely boy who kicks the shit out of evil, even while getting the shit kicked out of himself — as basically the coolest thing we had ever heard of. We’re already looking forward to buying tickets for neighborhood tenth graders.

Matthew Vaughn ready to ‘Kick-Ass’ [THR]