Home Video: 'Kick-Ass'

It's quite a surprise how well Matthew Vaughn's 2010 movie Kick-Ass holds up. It's out now on a new 4K Ultra HD Combo Pack (with Blu-ray & Digital HD) and it looks spectacular. Vaughn went on to direct X-Men: First Class (the best X-Men movie) and both Kingsman films.

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Based on the comic book series created by Mark Millar, Kick-Ass features Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Cholë Grace Moretz in the leads. It's only seven years old but both of them look like little kids and hardly seem like the same actors who've made such an impact lately in Nocturnal Animals and The Wall (Johnson) and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Moretz).

Taylor-Johnson is a teenager who decides to dress up and make himself a superhero called Kick-Ass. He goes viral when a video of fight in a gas station parking lot gets posted online and then stumbles on an underground world of real costumed crime fighters, including Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter/sidekick Hit Girl (Moretz). There's a battle going on with a criminal underworld led by Mark Strong, whose son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) decides to dress up and call himself Red Mist.

Unlike most superhero movies, the violence has consequences: bones crunch, blood spurts and everyone walks away from fights with bruises and scars. The movie's comic-book styling and bright colors look amazing on 4K disk. The Dolby Atmos audio mix is incredible. This is exactly the kind of modern, cutting-edge sound design that takes advantage of new home theater technology.