An Occasionally Fun, Mostly Juvenile Action/Comedy

Rating: 9/10 (4 August 2010)

Dave is a depressed nerd who can't understand why no one has every tried to be a super hero and decides to try it himself and call himself Kick Ass. While attempting to help out Katie Deauxma, his high school crush, he encounters two other vigilantes named Hit Girl and Big Daddy; a deranged father and daughter who are just a bit more serious about dolling out justice.
Kick-Ass is not soul-shattering stuff. It mostly consists of vulgar jokes, gratuitous violence and super hero clichés. The characters aren't particularly interesting and outside of Chloe Moretz, who is actually pretty impressive as Hit Girl, the acting is sub par. The plot is a bit of a mess and it's hard to really follow or care about what is going on. Kick-Ass teeters between action and comedy and never really finds a happy medium. It's not funny enough to be a comedy and not action oriented enough to be a proper action movie.
The music is good and some of the action sequences are impressive, even though suspension of disbelief is a must. I also have to commend Kick-Ass for it's originality and guts as Matthew Vaughn tried to combine many genres and include particularly shocking elements; a little girl slicing and dicing criminals with total relish. But, even though I appreciate him pushing the envelope I dislike the fact that it is used as a gimmick. It's as if Vaughn is saying; "isn't a little girl killing people cool," instead it just being part of the story.
Despite it's few good points Kick-Ass is a failure, mainly because of what it could have been. What was hailed as an ingenious retooling of the super hero genre feels very rehashed. You've heard these lines before, you've seen these characters before and the comedy; you've not laughed at before.