The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…

The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.

This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.

It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?

It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.

It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?

(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)

My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.

Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.

Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”

And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”

Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”

Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”

But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.

I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…

Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.

If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.

Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”

Now X-Men: First Class achieves something similar, only much more successfully. A 1960s-set prequel to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies – with Singer back on board with a story credit and as producer – this is a welcome return to the thematic material that makes mutant stories interesting.

Admittedly the characters are sometimes forced to announce these themes out loud, but that’s a small price to pay.

Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) does very well in some smaller moments, especially in the striking reverse-angle transformation of an innocuous office to a torture chamber; he also knows that the movie’s power comes from James McAvoy’s Charles and Michael Fassbender’s Erik, and the scenes they share are the movie’s highlights. If only the same could be said for January Jones as Emma Frost, who is embarrassingly lifeless here. The comic book version of Emma would be appalled by this pretender wearing her lingerie.

Vaughn struggles in the movie’s special effects-heavy sequences, though. Towards the end, things take on the look of a big-budget Smallville finale. That’s not a compliment. (I know fans, situated both in and out of Hollywood, can easily become obsessed with fidelity to their source material. I maybe just fell prey to it talking about Emma Frost, above. But including Banshee’s flying-with-flappy-wings-and-screaming-towards-the-ground? Yeah, that was never going to work.)

In fact, the whole movie looks a little cheap. A little made-for-TV. And that got me thinking: why not?

In some ways, First Class does mimic the structure and feel of comic books. For example, it begins with the same sequence that brutally kicked off Singer’s first X-Men film, and then adds another twist to it. This is common practice in comics as new writers pick apart heroes’ origin stories, always returning to embroider them with new, painful details. But with its small-screen spectacle, cast of thousands, and overstuffed plot – this ends up feeling less like comic books and more like mutant television.

As critic Paul Verhoeven wrote in his review: “Really, what they should have done was give it the Game of Thrones treatment and make a big, detailed, character-driven story all about the early Academy days.”

I couldn’t agree more. Charles and Erik, travelling the globe, recruiting mutants! Having zany adventures and philosophical disagreements on their ideological differences! Killing an occasional nazi along the way! That’s a season’s worth of entertainment even before they begin their mutant academy and lifelong rivalry. As enjoyable as this movie is, its second half feels like a clipshow of episode highlights to come.

Watching First Class also made me realise something has shifted in what I want from TV and what I want from film. It’s now television that seems to give me stories with truly epic scope. At the cinema, I’m leaning towards more singular spaces, driven less by narrative and more by a character’s subjectivity or particular mood.

It also made me realise, as so much television now looks so ‘cinematic’, I should probably stop saying ‘made-for-TV’.  Then again, ‘straight-to-video’ is still in my vocabulary…

Yes, TV Superman George Reeves was found dead by gunshot in 1959, whether from suicide or murder. And okay, fine, movie Superman Christopher Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse in 1995. But a curse? In his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom De Haven puts it like this:

For terrifying examples of the Curse of Superman, though, that’s about it. A lot of different actors have played the character over the past seventy-plus years, including Bud Collyer, who played him more often and longer than anyone, on radio and several different animated cartoon series, and he did just fine, becoming a famously affable network game-show host, died at a ripe old age.

There is no Batman Curse, either, no matter what the Daily Mail might’ve said during the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – even though many happily implied it was his role as the psychotic Joker that resulted in Heath Ledger’s death.

Cue ambiguous quote from an earlier Joker, Jack Nicholson: “I warned him.”

And now we have the ongoing parade of accidents in Broadway’s Spider-Man musical, awkwardly titled Turn Off the Dark. One performer was rushed to hospital after a thirty foot fall; the lead actress portraying the villain quit with the show still in previews; and other Broadway actors have made online statements like “DOES SOMEONE HAVE TO DIE?” Of course, there is no Spider-Man Curse. It’s ridiculous.

And yet.

And yet I can’t stop thinking of these accidents as modern echoes of ancient stories; myths of mortals impersonating gods and facing tragic consequences.

In comic books, ordinary mortals embodying superheroic abilities often ends badly. Taking the illegal, power-granting drug Mutant Growth Hormone can make your heart explode. In the collected manga Batman: Child of Dreams, ordinary people are transformed into Batman’s greatest foes like the Joker and the Penguin, but they can’t handle the strain. They burn out from the inside, weeping, physical falling to pieces. The “basic elevator pitch” of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents? “You get kickass superpowers for 365 days, and then you die.”

When super-team The Authority crashed into our reality – in Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s short-lived, two-issue run of 2007 – the heroes were shocked to find that no one here had powers. What’s worse was they worried just being here would be too much for our fragile earth. As their team shaman explained: “Even in our weakened state, we’re still too strong for this place. We may as well be monsters, trampling over the laws of nature until they break.”

We can wear the costumes, and strike the poses, and say the lines. We can hope our CGI doppelgangers do most of the spectacular stuntwork for us and that we aren’t left, terrified, tangled high over the orchestra pit. There is no Superhero Curse.

But what if Spider-Man’s skill, Superman’s strength, or the Joker’s psychosis are too much, too big, to be safely captured in mortal bodies and brains? What if comic book characters are described as ‘larger than life’ for a reason?

Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.

Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.

I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.

(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)

I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?

Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”

So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.

From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.

Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.

It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.

The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.

My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.

You’re welcome.

More and more, comic companies are hoping to supplement sales by offering digital versions of their titles with limited animation and voice acting that sounds like a first take at best. They think it’s just adding a gimmick to an existing story, like, say, slapping 3D on an old film.

What they don’t understand is that forcing this motion onto sequential art actually breaks something fundamental about comic book storytelling. It suggests a group of executives throwing a comic on the ground and poking at it with sticks. “Look!” they say, jabbing at the page. “It’s moving! It’s moving!”

Every time I see another attempt at selling motion comics, I’m surprised at how many ways they find to fail. First there’s the dialogue. A lot of what sits happily in word balloons sounds utterly ridiculous when spoken out loud by even the best actors – and the quality of actors featured on these animations is, uh, variable. Yes, let’s be polite and say “variable”.

There’s also the problem with redundancy, as illustrated by the Watchmen motion comic. It has an actor speaking the narration and dialogue – at the same time as the words are appearing on screen. Transmedia theorist Geoffrey Long points out that this could be because one narrator is doing all the voices, much as they would in an audio book, and the visual component “thus gives viewers a sense of who’s talking”. That’s true – but unless it’s a children’s read-along affair, you don’t usually read a book while also listening to its audio equivalent at once.

(Geoffrey Long’s piece is a much more even-handed survey of motion comics than this one, so go read the whole thing. Now back to my ranting…)

Problems like these are secondary to something much more problematic. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he declares that if you want to paint a world full of motion, “then be prepared to paint motion!” And sequential art has developed an astonishing number of techniques to imply motion, both within a single panel and between them. Not just the closure required by two panels in sequence, but speed lines, dialogue placement, panel size, and endless others. (For the academically-inclined, I wrote more about this last year for Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal.)

Introducing literal moments of motion into these panels somehow doesn’t add to these techniques – it just replaces them. Look, I’ve clocked up so many years of comic reading that I’m as conditioned to the idiosyncrasies of sequential art as anyone. And yet the moment I see art creak into motion, something inside me feels like when Homer Simpson saw someone in a wheelchair:

“Hey, they have chairs with wheels and here I am using my legs like a sucker!”

It might not be rational, but there it is: if the pictures can move on their own, why am I bothering to turn stillness into motion in my mind’s eye?

Anyway, Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men motion comic is the most ‘animated’ I’ve seen. It loses the speech-and-text redundancy and makes much more effort to find cinematic segues. It’s almost a cartoon, but it’s still less effective than any fully-fledged, traditionally animated TV episode. At best, it is still – as comic commentator Chris Sims recently put it – “a comic for people who will do anything they possibly can to avoid reading”.

Hollywood is still learning the hard way that comic art doesn’t function as easy storyboards; now animators need to discover sequential art doesn’t provide instant keyframes. And I agree wholeheartedly with Long when he says that “while motion comics may offer interesting differences from both animated shorts and actual comics, they arguably offer real advantages over neither.”

If nothing else, motion comics should try a new name. ‘Motion’ only draws attention to something they do rather unconvincingly. And ‘comics’? Once they move, I’m not sure they’re comics at all.

Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.

(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)

Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.

It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.

Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.

Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.

It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.

I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning  American-filmed version could do him justice.

And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.

Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.

That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)

Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.

Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.

No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)

It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?

Frankly, I’m not sure why.

It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.

The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.

Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.

Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.

And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.

A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?

Yeah, it’s Thor’s hammer.

Just like the Samuel L. Jackson-as-Nick-Fury appearance that ended the first Iron Man, Thor’s hammer was basically meaningless unless you were already in the know; unless you’re already enough of a superhero fan to know its significance. (My audience was about one-quarter “wooo!”, three-quarters “huh?”)

And while the gag with Captain America’s half-finished shield in Tony Stark’s lab was fun, there were plenty of these other, oddly alienating moments in Iron Man 2. Why not have someone say the Black Widow’s codename out loud? Why not explain who the hell Nick Fury actually is – other than Samuel L. Jackson letting his eyepatch do his acting for him?

It gets really weird, however, when you remember that the Iron Man movies’ Nick Fury is based on the Ultimate Universe version of the character. He was reinvented by much-praised ‘cinematic’ artist Bryan Hitch to resemble movie-star Samuel L. Jackson – and therefore Jackson was cast as Fury for Iron Man’s first big cinematic finish. It was a bizarre self-fulfilling transmedia prophecy, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.

Superhero movies (and, apparently, their fans) have always loved their easter eggs. These nods to other characters and other worlds are a way to suggest the shared universes of the comics that spawned them. And why not? These thousands of characters and decades of stories are one of the primary appeals of Marvel and DC’s superhero comics.

In his article “The Superhero with a Thousand Faces”, Luca Somigli said there’s a reason why Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman made a pre-disfigured Joker the man who’d killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It was to approximate the years of animosity they have in the comic books. And when Christopher Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins revealed its Joker card at the film’s conclusion, it was a thrilling moment – not because it was to reward dedicated fans, but because the Joker is so part of pop-culture consciousness that everyone in the cinema knew exactly what it meant.

Now Marvel’s planned run of interlinked Avengers movies – Iron Man, The Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America, and Thor – will let them mimic their comic books in a whole new way. These individual films are planned to culminate in (Joss Whedon’s?) The Avengers, which’ll feature all these characters at once.

Comics often try to be like movies, and that risks ignoring the specific qualities of sequential art and serial storytelling that make them unique. Now the reverse is coming true, too. My concern with Marvel’s films aping their comics is that they’ll feel less like actual movies and more like pointless prologues. Like easter egg hunts with comic book in-jokes and poorly-defined character parades as prizes. Iron Man 2 enjoyed all the trappings of the Marvel universe, but sometimes forgot to give the uninitiated reason to care.

More and more, I think this interconnectedness – and the shying away from more radical and auteuristic interpretations of these heroes it requires – will mean a more cohesive universe, sure, but much less interesting films.

I did enjoy much of Iron Man 2 (although I felt that trying to recreate the free-wheeling feel of the first one meant every scene went on 15% too long). In the spirit of the post-credits stinger, though, here’s a teaser of my other major qualm about the movie:

Do the military medals that end up pinned to Tony Stark’s chest mean he’s just a weapons manufacturer again?

I had a theory that Mark Millar’s stories would benefit enormously from quick edits and pop music. That cinema would maybe boost the good qualities of his writing (great concepts, snappy one-liners, black comedy) and cover some of its flaws (the sometimes shoddy execution of those concepts, or the way he can seem to get bored halfway through his own stories).

My review? Well, you might have heard that Kick-Ass is the story of what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero in the real world. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Kick-Ass, however, isn’t. It’s actually about what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero… and then meets some real superheroes already out there.

The movie’s definitely a success – certainly more than Vaughn’s only fitfully charming version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The action scenes are smart and inventive, especially considering the film’s semi-limited budget; they recreate the sense of John Romita Jr.’s art without being slavishly faithful to it like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen worship. Bursts of violence wrung at least three bursts of spontaneous applause from my audience.

Having actual humans step into these roles gives them new life, too. Both Aaron Johnson’s Kick-Ass and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Red Mist are better characters than they are on the page, and a hilarious Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy proves – yet again – that he’s developing a new alien form of acting that might only be properly appreciated by future generations.

The movie, though, is entirely stolen by Chloe Moretz as the tween assassin Hit Girl – and that’s part of the problem. Mortez is perfect in the role, oozing charisma, and I can see her becoming a cult figure for young girls everywhere. I’m not the only one, either. Read the half-excited, half-concerned “Hit Girl Could Be Your New Favorite Tween”.

Her relationship with her Big Daddy is the best part of the film that, and one of the only parts that doesn’t feel like empty calories. I’m a sucker for proud parents in fiction, and Big Daddy just seems so damn giddy to watch her in action; their bond has the best parts of Father Knows Best and Lone Wolf and Cub. Thankfully, the movie ditches Millar’s more painful Republican-versus-Democrat zingers, too.

But in order to make Kick-Ass an over-the-top action movie, Vaughn makes Hit Girl a pint-size John Woo-style killer. She ends up undercutting the supposed point of Millar’s comic. Millar said that the story originally began with Big Daddy and Hit Girl, and Kick-Ass was later added to reframe it into something more human, more real. You can tell. Kick-Ass himself never suddenly develops super-ninja-moves (as tempting as that must’ve been for this big screen version) but Big Daddy and Hit Girl would be entirely comfortable in the Marvel Universe alongside Elektra, Hawkeye, and whoever else suits the movie’s tagline: “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass.”

Kick-Ass’ high-school-loser realism and Hit Girl’s tween-ninja antics and angst never quite mesh together. It’s sometimes more like two movies sitting together side-by-side and occasionally intersecting, or, better still, two comic books that periodically cross over to boost sales. The movie’s hyped ‘realism’ is just an opening hook, not a high concept.

With my experiment in not reading the source material for once finally over, I came home from the screening and read them in a single sitting. I discovered that there’s a twist to Big Daddy’s character in the comics that didn’t make it into the film. It might’ve singlehanded short-circuited this logic glitch, and it’s a real shame the Kick-Ass movie decided not to keep it.

And you know what? The pop music did help. Everything’s better with The Banana Splits.