Not bad, all in all

Rating: 6/10 (2 May 2010)

This review is just intended for the users who already saw the movie, so please don't read it if you have not seen it already because it does contain spoilers.
I liked Kick Ass with some reserve. The biographic start would have been average or even good if they have not tried so hard to sound funny. Someone dying abruptly in a movie can be funny in certain contexts (like in Monty Python's Holy Grail when King Arthur and the knights are saved because the cartoonist died all of a sudden and thus could not develop the scene where the monster was about to kill them all), but certainly not in the situation portrayed in the beginning of Kick Ass. Well, that this movie wasn't written by any John Cleese became clear soon enough, given the amount of failed, bad-taste juvenile and brainless jokes throughout the movie.
On the other hand, I was not impressed by the violence that followed the biographical introduction, for I've seen much worse in horror/ gore movies, so while the violence was not a point against the film per se, it served to show once more (a bit like Park Chan-wook's Thirst, perhaps, but in a milder way here) that action is not enough to keep the pace in a movie, if such action adds little to the plot. So, there's not much happening in the first half of the movie and I kept wondering why they have made the film at all. At the same time, some qualities also start to show since the very beginning - good photography and camera work, and I as value such attributes a lot, even the first half wasn't so boring after all.
The film sort of explodes into the second half though, when the direction seems more defined and follows an intelligent path. Unlike most viewers, I'm not going to give to Chloe Moretz all the credit for bringing life to the film - while I think that her scenes were probably the best, it would not have happened just because of her acting (or choreography in the fighting scenes), but also for an incredible direction, music and camera work - in other words, her scenes were the best cared for. If the jokes kept being sort of dry in the second half, the references to other movies could make up for them (like the allusion to Tarantino's movies, subtly hinted by the music played in the scene at the hotel's hall). The cartoon part was pure genius, achieved in a superb way.
I gave 6/10 because in overall terms it cannot still be compared to the incredible, eternal movies that have sadly just scored 7 or even less in IMDb, so this 6 is a sort of absolute mark. In relative terms, and thinking mainly in the movies we are seeing in the first half of 2010 (saved by Dr Parnassus so far), I'd give 7 or even 8 stars to it, because it's well above the average nowadays.