Good - not great.

Rating: 7/10 (11 August 2010)

Seeing how the audience's standards seem to have lowered over the past decade, I generally expect a movie heralded as "great" to be decent, but almost never great.
That's where Kick-Ass lies in my book. I enjoyed the ride, and as an incredibly picky viewer, that says something. The film is, however, far from perfect - which is forgivable. There were a number of things, however, that could've been avoided or addressed, that would've helped the film to be truly great.
First, and most notably, is the film's outright identity crisis in theme. In a normal superhero or awesome vigilante tale, we expect a great amount of suspension of disbelief. Lots of things are going to happen that are totally unrealistic. That's fine. We expect that. Then, what amount of realism can be injected into the tale is a sort of treat - it helps with the immersion and seems to give the outlandish stuff some credibility... At least, enough to keep you involved.
With Kick-Ass, however, it was the complete opposite. The first act of the movie stresses the idea that "this story is grounded in a realistic world". That's fine. But then, later, when the outlandish stuff goes on... It's cool, and I can enjoy it, but it ripped me out of the world I thought I had just been introduced to. Only now do we understand that this is more of a mish-mash of themes - that it's actually not much different at heart from other superhero tales. That's fine. But what gives? You got me to LIKE the "realistic" side of things. You got me invested in it. Did you really think you couldn't stick to that for the entire movie, still follow the same plot, and not have it walk away victorious? Sigh.
The music has the same problems. One second we're immersed under hypnotically epic tracks from the films "28 Days Later" and "Sunshine" - - then it turns around and prods a pop-rock track at us akin to a normal "edgy teen flick".
In short, I found myself not knowing what to feel at a given moment, because I was too busy wondering how I should feel about the previous 20 minutes. Speaking of running time, with the amount of scenes that were drawn out for dramatic effect (only to be resolved in a minute or two by grandiose action), they could've developed one more superhero and had him/her die in a gritty, realistic manner. Would've helped.
Worst of all was the final reveal of the "secret weapon", which, even though it exists in the real world, was seriously off the mark. I won't spoil anything, but if the "secret weapon" had been revealed to be a tricked-out grenade launcher, a single mini-gun, one of those armed robot rover things... Anything along those ends would've sufficed. What it actually turned out to be was just too much.
All in all, I still found my attention fixed on the film, and I did find myself "digging it". The effort was noble. The result was well-done. For a little get-away into a movie on a Friday night, I supposed you couldn't ask for more.
Kick-Ass kicks ass, but I'll have to stick with The Dark Knight as the best modern superhero flick ... for now. 7/10