I saw it last night with my husband and my 14 year old son. Son loved it. My husband and I think it’s 2 hours of our life we won’t get back. I actually asked him twice during the movie what time it was so that I had an idea how much longer we had to sit there.
I found the fight scenes boring, repetitive, and tedious.
The little girl played her role well… that’s about the only compliment I can give this movie. I didn’t quite HATE it, because I can’t work up enough caring about it for that level of emotion… but you’d have to pay me a good sum of money to make me sit through that again. At least, sober.
So am I the only one who didn’t like it? The other thread is just nonstop gushing over how fantastic it was.
I thought it was trying too hard to be witty and original and the cinematography was simply terrible. I got a few laughs out of it, and Chloe Moretz did a good job as Hit-Girl, but other than that it was just an ok action movie. It wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t horrible, just a so-so action movie.
I wouldn’t say it sucked, but I was very disappointed given the through-the-roof ratings it’s been getting on IMDb. The writing seemed amateurish. The movie dragged for long stretches, and the script only delivered a few mild chuckles. No belly laughs.
I didn’t consider it to be an action movie nor a comedy; that may be where you went wrong when watching it. People can get thrown off and dislike a movie if it’s not the genre they were expecting and their senses didn’t realign.
I didn’t know much about this movie other than that people were raving about it. I was actually expecting a sort of satire or parody of comic book movies. At first it was an interesting concept: what would happen if some high school kid actually tried to fight crime like a super-hero. The result was that he got his ass kicked, as expected. But then we see Big-Daddy and Hit-Girl, and they were just like comic book super-heroes. So the entire premise sort of fell apart. What started off as a deconstruction of comic books turned into a typical comic book action movie, with an added forced sense of humor. For me, that was the biggest failure of the movie.
I was reminded of Defendor and Zombieland, two movies which I enjoyed much more than this.
Here’s what I wrote in another thread:
*
I thought it was pretty good-- and I’m going to sound like such a fucking insufferable nerd here-- but I honestly feel like the comic was better.
It set the Red Mist storyline up so that it truly was a shocking reveal, rather than basically letting you know from the get-go what was up with that.
It made the much more realistic decision of having the girl blow off Dave when she found out he wasn’t gay, thus saving us from that awful shoe-horned “love story.”
It had a consistent tone and vision, and didn’t ramble as much. The movie never figured out if it was a comedy, a drama, a love story, a teen movie, a superhero flick, an action movie, etc etc.
The movie was good, but when I heard that the director’s cut was going to be 18-minutes longer I thought: hmmm, if I was the director, the Director’s Cut would be 18 minutes shorter.
I found it annoying how [Atomic Comics] bought their way so prominently into the movie.
I agree that Chloe Moretz lit up the screen, though, and that’s a HUGE compliment coming from me, because 99% of child actor performances annoy the shit out of me.*
Edit: And I should add: the comic didn’t have the jet-pack, which took it way too far into comic book fantasy territory, IMO, for a concept that was supposed to be “realistic” (even after making generous allowances for realism up to that point.)
Big Daddy’s main skill was being very good with guns, and given his history as an apparently exemplary cop, not shocking.
Hit Girl, on the other hand, was raised to fight. Kids, especially at that age, have a greater capacity for learning than they will at any other point in their lives. He didn’t have her in school (presumably home schooling her) and they spent time every day on athletic skills, shooting, knife fighting, what have you. Chloe Moretz spent three months in training for the role - and if she had devoted every day from ages five to eleven training, there is nothing her character did that wouldn’t be possible. Were any of her gymnastic moves out the the realm of possibility for an Olympic level gymnast?
I just spent the last two weekends videotaping concerts by the local School of Rock. Some of the kids were mediocre, some were competent, and a handful were as skilled as 99% of the professional musicians I’ve paid to see perform in concert. And the most skilled was ten years old. It’s a different skill set, granted, but I’ve seen what a sufficiently motivated kid can accomplish.
Off the top of my head, the double clip exchange in mid-air is probably impossible. But the point is, flipping around like a gymnast during a gunfight is a good way to get shot.
Loved the comic, hated the movie. If you adapt a prior work, whatever changes you make, you really have to keep the same theme. The film didn’t.
The comic’s theme was “Don’t try this at home, kids. Fredric Wertham was right.” The movie’s theme was “This is so crazy it just might work…!”
The comic was a brilliant metatext: A comic book about a kid whose life was ruined by comic books. It had no fantasy elements. The movie had a couple of fantasy elements, like the rocket belt that didn’t flip over once the Gatling guns started firing.
I initially did not like Kill Bill, although after several viewings I admit it has grown on me somewhat. In my opinion, Kill Bill is Tarantino’s weakest film. Both Kill Bill and Kick-Ass are filled with cartoonish violence, but I think that is where the comparisons end. I often disagree with the choices Tarantino makes for his films, but I recognize that he is a genius. Matthew Vaughn is a talented director, but I don’t think he has enough experience as a writer or a director to make a movie like Kick-Ass work. Kill Bill had a few moments of true greatness, and if both volumes are viewed back-to-back, has an epic scope that elevates it to a good movie. Kick-Ass never really rose above mediocrity for me.
I’ve seen 67 movies so far this year (it’ll be 70 after tomorrow night), a majority of them good-to-great. For sheer balls-out fun, Kick-Ass is the best one I’ve seen. I’m sure it’ll be one of my favorites of the year come Dec. 31. But I can see why some wouldn’t like it. It’s not for everybody.
I absolutely adored the Kill Bill movies btw. But then, I think Tarantino is a god among filmmakers, so there is that fangirl bias.
I liked the movie. It was basically a good time if you didn’t think about it to much. But I agree that it was very uneven and disjointed. My big question is that on the one hand you have Kick-Ass, which is a (sort of) realistic look at what would happen if someone decided out of the blue to dress up and fight crime. But the realism was completely undercut by the characters of Big Daddy and Hit Girl. I don’t care how much training she has or how good at gymnastics she is, there’s no way an 11 girl can take out a building full of armed strong guys, can handle and carry heavy powerful weapons, can have the arm strength to stab and spear people repeatedly, and can do all this without being reduced to a psychological wreck.
It tried to be both a superhero movie and a realistic black comedy at the same time. That just didin’t work.
That said it had a lot of fun bits, even if it didn’t hang together. Big Daddy’s Adam West impersonation had me in stitches.
Eh? How could you possibly get that? Aside frm some extremely general themes, they couldn’t be further apart in tone, style, and overall concept. The sole thing they have is “real teens as superheroes”. But they are utterly different in what they do with that premise, how it is set, and what goes on.
I thought it was alright, but I think I was distracted by the cinematography throughout the whole thing. It tried too hard to look like Spider-Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen and it kept taking me out of the film. The girl I took loved it though.
We immediately said “that had a very Kill Bill feel to it” when we walked out. I thought the schtick in Kill Bill (I and II) got old, but I still liked those movies better than this one.