Comic book haters, beware the cinemas in 2010. This new year alone brings The Green Hornet, The Losers and the highly-anticipated Iron Man 2. But the second most-awaited flick of ‘10 according to Screen Rant isn’t from Marvel, or even Seth Rogen: it’s Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass.

With a title like that, do I even have to further convince you to want to see this movie? Kick-Ass centers on high school loser Dave Lizewski who, one day, up and decides he wants to be a superhero. Though he has no special advantages or even a need to become one. Like every other fanboy in the world, I’m excited to see what director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust) is able to do with the screenplay he co-wrote with Jane Goldman.

Kick-Ass isn’t just the mechanical superhero movie that studios incessantly spit out for profit. In fact, I didn’t even know that this was a superhero movie when it was announced. What could divide reactions for Kick-Ass is how it handles the raunchy humor seen in the trailers. This movie is a hard-R, by the way, thus able to get away with far more things than a PG-13 flick could. Take Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, for example. You think Matthew Vaughn could dangle a blue penis in front of you for two and half hours? It’s a marvel that this movie is even happening at all. Then again, I felt the same way prior to seeing Watchmen last year.

I’m going to stop myself from saying that the Kick-Ass marketing campaign has been great. I don’t recall seeing many trailers for Stardust or Layer Cake; Vaughn really has something big on his hands this time around, and he knows it as well as the rest of us that this movie could make or break him career-wise. I’m told the footage he ran at Comic-Con last year was pretty badass, but I have yet to see it. To me the green-band and red-band trailers released for this thing have induced goose bumps. The only thing wrong with them is that they don’t really have a target audience in mind. You could place the insane red-band Hit Girl trailer in front of either Youth in Revolt or Daybreakers and probably still get equal reactions from both crowds. Expect the ultimate audience clash on April 16^th.

Only two months since the first green-band trailer debuted online and Kick-Ass has already managed to piss off family value groups, Rupert Murdoch, and The Australian Daily Telegraph newspaper. Little do these highbrows know that the controversy they’re currently stirring up is only helping to spread the word around. My most-anticipated movie of 2010 has to be Kick-Ass. Even if it is a giant stinker, or if it starts big box office-wise then quickly deflates, I’ll be entirely grateful for Kick-Ass. In the movie cesspool of crap that is the winter months, there’s nary as talked-about a movie as this. For now, let’s just enjoy basking in the radiant glow of Matthew Vaughn’s work. It doesn’t have to be a giant blockbuster, but Kick-Ass has so far proved that it can be exactly that.

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