Little Chunks of Awesome

#1 Kick-Ass

After a kind of aborted start to my Literally Geeking career following my Rare Exports post back before Christmas, this is me back with the first of two regular columns I'm hoping to debut this week.

I'll talk more about the second later (hopefully on Friday!), but right now it seems more pertinent to introduce 'Little Chunks of Awesome'. The goal of LCA (like my nifty little acronym? Just thought of that right there. That's the kind of mad improvisation skills you're going to get from my writing), is to take those little moments in films or from TV shows, tiny minutes long chunks, that within them distil what it was that made that film or show so great from my point of view. In future I may even tackle the opposite and look at moments that really offer, in microcosm, reasons why I see the films or shows as a failure.

Now originally, I had planned for the first instalment of this feature to look at Louis CK's amazing sitcom 'Louie' but, unfortunately, I was unable to pick just one moment of that show that I wanted to feature – largely because 'Duckling' was too obvious a choice and has already been talked about to death by columnists on other sites.

However, as luck would have it, this stopped being a problem when during some idle channel surfing on Friday afternoon I happened across an airing of Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's 2010 superhero action-comedy.

It was the first time I had watched the film properly since I saw it in the cinema on release and, as much as I enjoyed it first time out, I think I got far more out of it this time round. However, the one thing that worried me as I watched was: will the strobe light rescue sequence hold-up?

The first time I saw the movie, that was the bit that really stood out for me. It was just a hugely impressive piece of cinema and, rendered on the big screen, the tension of it was almost unbearable – but, like, in the best way imaginable.

So, on TV, was it as good as I remembered?

No.

It was much better.

If there has been a more impressive sequence in any movie in the past few years, I don't know what it was.

Everything about this was spot on. The first person-shooter aspect at the start. The darkness. The strobe light. The fire. Nicolas Cage's anguished screams. John Murphy's score. And the editing, my God, the editing.

The sequence is knitted together so perfectly that you actually begin to fear for the villians and forget that they are up against a 10-year-old girl. It's like watching a horror movie where you're actively rooting for the monster, such is the atmospheric intensity of the whole thing.

It is the stand-out sequence in a movie which is not short on great sequences, in that it sells the action, but it also perfectly sells the emotional stakes and gives a real sense of pathos to an incredibly weird, and yet rather sweet, father-daughter relationship that has been built up throughout the movie by Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz.

More than anything though, it was at that point of the movie where I finally realised that Vaughn really had the chops in the director's chair. Layer Cake and Stardust had been OK, but nothing about them – beyond Daniel Craig's breakthrough performance in the former – had really stood out. However, you come out of Kick-Ass desperate to see what Vaughn would turn his hand to next.

Just a pity that turned out to be the underwhelming X-Men: First Class.

Anyway, I hope to be back on Friday with the first edition of Internet Movie Douchebag so, until then, try not to get yourself killed. I kind of like you.