Count me in the minority

Rating: 3/10 (27 April 2010)

Oh, well. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the reviews for "Kick Ass" on this site range from glowing to downright worshipful, I guess I'll have to dissent.
I didn't hate the film--in fact, I think it's well written, and very well paced. Technically, it is excellent. It does have some holes and inconsistencies in the story. There were a couple of plot twists and deus ex machinas that you could see coming from a mile away, and/or were a bit much to take, but that's par for the course with films such as this.
A lot has been made of the character of "Hit Girl," played by Chloë Grace Moretz, and for good reason. She's the reason that "Kick Ass" is groundbreaking, in its way--not necessarily a good, way, IMHO. We have a character, an eleven or twelve year old girl, who proficiently, sadistically and graphically kills people, with smiles and taunts, and graphic profanity. It's safe to say that she's responsible for the vast majority of of the film's prolific body count.
Take a kiddie/teen tongue in cheek fantasy/adventure film. Add a heavy dose of Scorsese-style profanity and Mob themes, along with Tarantino-style graphic, splattering gore, spurting blood, and dismemberment, and you've got "Kick Ass."
It's far more violent and gory than "The Dark Night," either "Hulk" movie, either of the two "Spiderman" movies that I've seen, or for that matter, any of the other superhero movies that I remember. In another time, and not long ago, no one under the age of sixteen would/should have been allowed anywhere near it. But this movie has demonstrated--emphatically-- that just about anything regarding violence and gore goes as far as getting young people into theaters these days.
I want to take nothing from Chloë Grace Moretz; she's likely a superstar in the making. There are very few other actors her age that could have made such a character as hers work, but she pulls it off brilliantly, and as believably as could have possibly been done (even though most or all of the martial arts/bullet dodging/gun fighting feats that her character performs are absurd even for this genre of film). She strikes me like Dakota Fanning or Jurnee Smollett, the amazing young actress in "Eve's Bayou." They're those very young actors who--at least regarding the acting craft--each seem to carry very old and world wise souls inside their child's bodies.
But I can't help but be given pause regarding how far we've come (or regressed) as a society when a sadistic child assassin (who among other things in the movie, pursues and then murders a fleeing, unarmed woman) is one of the "heroes" of a top grossing film, to all of these effusively approving reviews. I suppose the saving grace is that practically all of the people that she kills are scumbags.
As a person of the male gender, I have no problem with woman characters who kick butt as well as or better than any man--quite the opposite. But this was not quite the same.
If the film had been more serious about what made Mindy/Hit-Girl tick, and emphasized the context of her as someone profoundly screwed up, and the product of a profoundly screwed up life experience (there are some things in her past that it alludes to that much more could/should have been done with), then it would have been far more compelling and defensible--I'm particularly thinking of "Let The Right One In". Instead, what is emphasized is the violence that she metes out--the thrills of her stylized, computer enhanced, artfully choreographed acrobatics and battle scenes and killing. That, in the view of the makers of the film, is apparently all that the demographic that they were aiming at is interested in (and unfortunately, they're likely right).
In that regard, I think the biggest stretch of all was toward the end. That after having faced--and decimated--a roomful of mobsters shooting at her (on two separate occasions) along with everything else that she's been through, she enters school, on the verge of interacting and socializing with people her own age for the first time in her life, and apparently just carries on like any normal girl (though she beats up the two inevitable bullies who demand her lunch money). Huh?!?!
I'm sure that even now someone, licking their chops at the prospect of matching or surpassing the box office receipts that "Kick Ass" has brought in, is probably thinking of how to top this, and is working on a pitch for the next rendition of this film genre.
What's next? With CGI these days, anyone, even an infant or toddler, can be transformed, on screen, into a near indestructible martial arts master and firearms expert mass-killer uber-assassin.
Will we witness, in the next movie, profanity shouting five and six year old killers? Or two year old toddlers mowing down and slicing apart crowds of people with machine guns from their strollers while yelling the "c" word? In the context of a film designed to get laughs?
I think "Kick-Ass" is worth seeing, if only because of its role as a landmark where the line of what is acceptable to us as a society has been pushed, irrevocably, ever further. I just don't share the opinion of some of the people on this site who consider it a transcendent masterpiece, yet it is definitely not boring.
But I have very mixed, even foreboding feelings about the experience.