Kick-Ass needs some kick-ass music of its own

Don't get me wrong, I loved Kick-Ass. From beginning to end the film is a joy, a pleasant surprise to someone like me who had been massively unimpressed with Matthew Vaughn's previous movies, Layer Cake and Stardust. Both those films seemed to be the work of a director who had surrounded himself with a highly talented cast and crew while displaying no directorial presence himself: as a director he made a great producer. While they seemed smug and complacent in their competence, Kick-Ass is far more assured, with much more verve and character. It's up there with Iron Man and The Dark Knight as one of those superhero movies that does so much right that it'd be churlish to even mention any shortcomings. So, this is me being churlish.

In the opening titles there's something a little unusual. The "music composed by" credit lists four names: John Murphy, Henry Jackman, Marius De Vries and Ilan Eshkeri. Now that seemed interesting, four fairly prominent names in the soundtracking business working together on a movie. As someone who has enjoyed John Murphy's work for Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Sunshine, I was looking forward to hearing his contribution in particular. Would it stand out from the others? Yes, it does, but for all the wrong reasons.

As the movie ramps up for the lengthy, action-packed finale the music is clearly Murphy's. It's Murphy's music for 28 Days Later, one of the variants of In the House – In a Heartbeat. As the movie progresses there's more from Murphy, what sounds like his music from Sunshine. Kick-Ass reuses his scores, his highly recognisable scores that have previously been heard not only in the movies for which they were written, but also achieved omnipresence on trailers, adverts and TV.

It's nothing new re-using movie music: Tarantino exclusively soundtracks his films to existing songs and film music, usually deciding on which tunes to use at the scripting stage. His choices are relatively obscure and a nice treat for movie buffs. With Tarantino's films I enjoy getting to hear music I'd only heard on VHS copies of films, all polished up, blaring out of cinema speakers, back where they belong. Scorsese has some history of this too, such as using part of Georges Delerue's Le Mepris soundtrack for a dramatic scene in Casino. Sometimes such appropriation can be used as a form of shorthand – as with Edgar Wright's usage of a snippet of Goblin's music from Dawn of the Dead for Shaun of the Dead, which reassured zombie movie fans that they were in safe hands. More often than not it's used for humorous reasons: John Williams's Jaws theme became a joke in itself when employed in Airplane!, Caddyshack II, Half Baked, K-9 and many, many others.

The most common usage of existing soundtracks is in movie trailers, understandably as most trailers are cut when the movie is still in post-production. I've lost count of the number of trailers I've seen that used James Horner's Aliens, Hans Zimmer's Crimson Tide, Clint Mansell's Requiem for a Dream and, yes, Murphy's 28 Days Later.

What may have happened with Kick-Ass is a case of temp-track love. To get the film feeling more like a film in the early stages of completion, scenes are often cut to existing movie scores as a temporary placemat. Sometimes this music fits so well that it's hard for the director to consider replacing it. The recent Watchmen film is a good example of this, with the Dr Manhattan on Mars sequence using Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi. In that instance it stood out so much from the movie's fairly anonymous actual score it had many wondering why they didn't just get Glass to do the whole thing. 2001: A Space Odyssey is an even more prominent example. While the film had an original score written by Alex North, Kubrick shelved it in favour of the classical music the film was cut to. He even achieved a sort of ownership of the tracks: any subsequent use of the Blue Danube waltz and, especially, Also Sprach Zarathustra in movies will immediately bring 2001 to mind.

But using existing scores isn't the same as using classical music. They come with more baggage. In Kick-Ass, the music used is so recent and so generally overexposed that it pulled me out of the film in a way the use of songs in the film – such as the Dickies' Banana Splits and The Prodigy's Manfred Mann-sampling Stand Up – did not. It wasn't just brief cuts either, it seemed to go on for ages. A shame as while I was supposed to be completely wrapped up in the daring rescue and revenge plot against the movie's baddies, all I could think of was "when will they stop stealing this music?"