creepy, dull, and dumb

Rating: 3/10 (22 May 2012)

There is so much wrong with this movie on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin. So I'll walk you through it.
It begins with a dweeb who takes it into his mind to be a superhero. Why? Well, the movie goes out of its way to deny there's a reason; he's not avenging anything, he doesn't seem to have a strong feeling about crime, he's not remotely physically capable of being a superhero. But he tries it. And he gets badly hurt. And even though he is badly hurt for something he seems to have little passion for, he keeps doing it.
So early on in the film, I'm feeling a disconnect. I don't understand the protagonist's motivation, and I don't find him particularly likable. And the movie itself is a rather middling, unfunny comedy that can't decide if it's going for realism (his lame costume, the way he gets beat up) or dumb comedy (the way he pretends to be a gay to befriend a girl he likes).
20 minutes or so in, I was feeling like giving up on the movie, but I just kind of wanted to see where they were going with the whole premise, because so far the movie had a wandering, confused feel to it.
Then comes the scene where the kid confronts a room full of criminals, even though if he had a brain in his head he would understand that would get him killed. And it would have if an 11-year-old girl who, it has been established, has been trained in weapons by her unstable but loving father, didn't come in and kill the 8 or 9 people in the room.
This marks a real shift in the movie. All pretense to reality is tossed out, as the little girl, wearing a superhero costume, slices and dices everyone in the room. It's a horrific scene, since many of the people she gleefully murders just want to run away. It is psychotic vigilante justice.
A normal teens reaction to seeing mass murder would be one of horror and lifelong trauma, but instead the kid just envies these people for being the "real deal." And even though he considers doing the only intelligent thing and quitting, he doesn't do that.
The problem, I think, is that this movie isn't quite sure what it wants to be. It's not an over-the-top comic-book comedy, it's not an adrenaline-rush action picture, it's not a drama about trying to find your place in the world, but a weird, completely unsuccessful attempt to veer wildly from one to the other.
I kept watching for a while, still curious as to where on earth they were going with this, but as I watched the little girl murder another man in a car crusher and saw the mob boss's son's silly plan to entrap the hero, the fact that I was both completely bored and rather disturbed became too much for me. So I read the plot synopsis in wikipedia, and nothing I read in it made me regret stopping where I did.
Perhaps this all worked in the comic book the movie was based on. The very unreality inherent in comic books might make this weird mish-mash come together. But the movie, or at least the first half of it, is a train wreck.