Back-shelf pick: 'Kick-Ass'

“Kick Ass” (2010) — Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) doesn’t let his lack of superpowers or even fighting skills stop him from playing superhero in his neighborhood.

It turns out to be a horrible and wonderful idea in ways you can’t imagine.

“Kick Ass,” promoted as a straight-up action comedy, is actually an extremely off-kilter, stylish, ultraviolent and curiously subversive comic book homage.

I love Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz as a wronged former cop and the daughter he’s raising to be a hit girl (reminiscent of “The Professional.”)

They join Kick Ass to become a motley kind of Fantastic Three.