Has something new to offer in a familiar genre

Rating: Null/10 (20 April 2010)

For the audience, it takes a little while to get the right balance between the various things this movie is: outlandish black comedy, blood-boiling action, subdues pathos and conventional melodrama.
The movie opens with parallel stories of two "heroes" which the audience obviously know that will converge. However, the convergence which comes quite early in the story is only a slight nod rather than an immediately alliance. The more conventional (if you can say that at all) is a girl, Hit Girl, trained to be a deadly Amazon and we've seen all that in Kill Bill. But when this girl is only 11 and throws around obscenities that make a sailor blush, you can't call that very conventional.
The other hero, the titular protagonist, is anything but conventional. Look at the simplest thing: his costume is a drab and ugly wetsuit. The "birth" of the hero is in his talking aloud to himself, asking why superheroes appear only in comic books and not real life. This high-school kid really walks the walk. But he has neither superpower (as does Superman) nor super wealth (as does Batman). He starts out his first mission with absolutely no special power. By the time he takes on his second one, he does have a certain kind of special power, and it is actually the consequence of the first one. He is almost fatally stabbed the first time and after the resultant surgery, has completely lost his ability to feel pain. So in the second time, the goons eventually leave him alone not out of fear or kindness, but simply because of lost of interest (there's no fun in beating up a sand bag). The third time he would have got himself killed but for Hit Girl, hence the convergence.
Hit Girl has been trained by his father Big Daddy (Nick Cage) and the vigilante team has quest of vengeance. This is basically it and do not expect much by way of unpredictability. The action however is tip-notch and has a kind of explosive atomic (meaning small) dynamic power coming from a four-foot-five (I guess) 11-year-old girl. Director Matthew Vaughn ("Stardust" has turned this recent (2008) hot comic into something quite watchable with potentials for a franchise. Most recent milestone: #129 in IMDb's "top 250" and this week's box office leader.