What's wrong?

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2016)

(This will be food for thought for people that watched it, and not a proper review)
I really want to enjoy this movie more, and, in some scenes, the movie actually is great, but it just doesn't work as a whole. Like most people, I thought 'Hit-Girl' stole the movie and found her character great fun... at first.
Ebert felt the problem is that this character of an ultra-violent 11 year old girl, trained by her revenge-obsessed dad, that kills dozens of men without blinking an eye, is immoral and sad. Sure, this is true, but only if her character was presented as something to take seriously. And that's exactly what this movie did, unintentionally. Because it made her way too cool, because Chloe was simply too good at making her charming and real, and most of all, because her relationship with her dad and her climactic battle, took an all-too-serious turn.
See, you can't go for campy fun, then demand that the audience invest their emotions in a character that is supposed to be a parody, or an over-the-top fun cartoon character. Imagine if Wile E. Coyote was suddenly shown to be a desperate dad trying to bring home food to his dying daughter. What would that do to the Road Runner cartoons? Those cartoons feature ultra-violence and kids watch them all the time, but they don't feel objectionable (at least to some people), because of the point I'm trying to make.
Another way of saying this, is what other people said: This movie is too inconsistent in tone. Hit-Girl and her dad are a kick-ass fun duo, but then they are suddenly involved in a very dramatic, painful and sad death scene. The movie starts with a teenager who hopelessly wants to be a super-hero and fails realistically, but then shifts to an unrealistic 11-year-old super-fighter. All these approaches conflict with each other, which is why it doesn't work, and which is why I think Ebert was disturbed by a character that was supposed to be silly fun.
Also, both the characters and the events keep veering from realistic to cartoonish. One minute the guy is stabbed by simple street thugs and having sloppy street-brawls realistically, the next, his steel implants after a near-fatal accident make him stronger instead of weaker, and he is flying new untested gadgets in seconds and having elaborate stick-fights. Is this movie about nerds that want to be super heroes, or about nerds that get their wish fulfilled in some kind of alternate fun reality? Either one of these ideas would work, but not both! Make up your minds!
And then there's her swearing: I'm not against swearing in movies, but when the writers make her character swear for no reason whatsoever just because she is an 11 year old girl, and when, if you think about it, it wouldn't make sense that her dad would condone or encourage such swearing, it turns the movie into juvenile trash written by writers who would rather insert a juvenile joke into the movie than focus on what they are trying to achieve.