Kick-Ass

My 2 word review: Fairly Mediocre.

The character of Kick-Ass ends up being Dave, a teenager with a hyper-sense of heroism (due to reading lots and lots of comic books) and over-active imagination that fuels a need to right wrongs he sees in real life.  His unintentionally thoughtless heroics are captured on a camera-phone, and the footage spurs interest and confusion over who is responsible for disrupting the  drug operations of Frank.  The confusion is justified as the other vigilantes, Big Daddy and Hit Girl, are the ones really doing a number on Frank's operations and provokes Frank into hunting down Kick-Ass.  Frank's son, Chris, gets into the fray when he offers up a play to draw out Kick-Ass. Eventually BD and HG's roles in disrupting Frank's operations comes to light.

I can't count how many times I thought to myself that movie was pretty terrible in execution, in script, in concept during its running time.  It's just such a flatline of a film, though it tries to jump-start many scenes with various musical score and cues or over-the-top violence, or even lame dialogue and lamer use of profanity (simply pointless and dumb), but it was simply ineffective because the direction is lazy and boring, and the story sputters and never really finds its footing.

With an overlong and inept first 2/3 of the film, even the final 1/3 of the film with some sequences featuring Hit Girl and Kick-Ass doesn't quite salvage this film for me, as I found it virtually impossible to suspend my disbelief over what was happening on the screen.  Others may enjoy it, but ultimately, I remained unimpressed.  Tonally, the film was bit on the schizo side, not quite knowing whether to play it for real, or for surreal or even fantastical, even though it tried desperately to "keep it real" in terms of abilities and skills, in the end, it succumbs to even lazier plot cliches to keep the "heroes" from assuming room temperature prematurely.

I give it 2 stars, or a grade of C.