Toward the end of the ultra-violent, bitingly funny Kick-Ass, director Matthew Vaughn tips his hand and lets you know he knows the body count is reaching absurdist proportions. As 11-year-old superhero wannabe Mindy Macready (Chloe Moretz) dons night-vision goggles to dispatch a dozen lumbering bad guys in the dark, we see the ensuing shootout through her green-tinted gaze. And as she coolly picks off one well-dressed gangster after another, it’s impossible to not be reminded of a first-person-shooter video game. This is wish-fulfillment for a generation weaned on Halo and Call of Duty.

Not to say that that’s the film’s point. In fact, it might be the opposite. In this smart adaptation of the Mark Millar comic book that mixes coming-of-age angst with balls-to-the-wall action, proto-geek protagonist Andrew Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is just a graphic novel–loving teenager who, after being mugged one too many times, slips into a Mountain Dew–hued unitard to fight for all the little guys. The only problem: he’s far from an ass-kicker, and he learns early on that you need to arm yourself with more than just righteous anger to take on crime. It’s only by accident that he teams up with Macready and her dad (Nicolas Cage) to bring down a shady syndicate, and by then, he’s already started to second-guess the valor in vigilantism.

It would be easy to go all moral outrage-y on Kick-Ass for gleefully sending a pre-teen girl on a string of killing sprees, and plenty of people will. But while Vaughn seems to revel in every busted dome, the carnage is tempered by a sharp, self-aware sense of humor that winks at audiences tired of seeing superheroes escape from every scrape unscathed. “At some point in our lives, we all wanted to be a superhero,” Lizewski says in his opening monologue. Maybe, but it’s not often that we stop to consider just how brutal being a bad-ass can be.

Kick-Ass opens in theaters nationwide on April 16.