Kick Ass (2010)

I really wanted to like Kick Ass more than I was able to. I thought “Hey! Kids imitating/deconstructing the notion of superheroes while making cheeky jokes! What’s not to like?” Sadly there was a lot not to like.

There was the silly-bad score (not usually something I comment on but definitely was distracting here), the overly flippant use of adolescent (sex/sexuality based) humor, and in my opinion, a failed effort to cover the back story of too many different characters to get me interested in any single one. I’d have much preferred a movie that delved deeply into the psychology of one instead of three (or four or five) misfit superhero/villain wannabes.

I think the makers of Kick Ass were going for smart pastiche of the extremely overplayed superhero genre, but ended up with something too insincere to be homage, and something with too much undirected minor tinkering with genre convention to be truly or interestingly divergent from what’s already out there.

Overall, underwhelming. Not worth it.