Looking back on Kick-Ass, I find that I am of two minds. On one side, the film is obviously energetic, well-acted, and certainly features a number of scenes I won't soon forget. The movie is also very funny at times. On the other side, this is also an extremely disjointed movie, featuring severe shifts in tone and style. All of the characters seem to have wandered in from a different movie, and they collide in a single film that is often entertaining, but also often seems confused as to what it is.

Let's start by looking at the main character, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson). Dave is an average teenager. He admits this up-front in his narration. There's nothing special about him. He's not even the "funny one" in the small group of friends he hangs out with at school. His two best friends, Marty (Clark Duke) and Todd (Evan Peters), and him hang out at the comic book store, and basically look and talk like they've wandered in from a Judd Apatow comedy. They have a sarcastic and smart view on comics, women, and sex that would make them seem right at home in Superbad or Knocked Up. Speaking of Superbad, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (who played "McLovin" in that film) hangs out at the comic book shop, too. He plays Chris, the wealthy and isolated son of the city's local crime boss, Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). For all his money, Chris really just wants to have friends. Oh, and he also wants to take control of his father's criminal empire someday. As for Dave, he asks a simple but life-changing question to Marty and Todd - "What would happen if someone actually tried to be a superhero"?

It's an honest question, if you think about it. Dave figures someone doesn't need powers to be a superhero. Just the right training, the right costume, and the desire to want to help people in need. Dave needs something in his life. His home life is boring, and his school life is worse, since he's constantly ignored by the girl he's long had a crush on, Katie Deauxma (Lyndsey Fonseca). His crazy idea of attempting to be a real-life crime fighter just might be the thing he needs to add a little excitement in his life. He orders a costume off the internet, modifies it a little, and takes up the name of "Kick-Ass". His first attempt at superheroics does not end up well. He tries to stop some carjackers, and ends up getting stabbed in the stomach and run over by a car. His second attempt to stop a crime he witnesses goes a little bit better, and manages to be captured by someone's camera phone. The person puts the video on Youtube, and "Kick-Ass" becomes an internet sensation. I kind of liked this aspect of the film, and how it viewed how the media would become attached to this costumed hero. Even if he wasn't that good at his job, the fact that he's actually out there sparks people's interest. It even grabs Katie's attention, though not in the way Dave probably hoped.

Up to this point, Kick-Ass has played as a sort of R-rated rift on Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man film. But there are two other characters that the movie keeps on cutting to once in a while who will soon play large roles in the plot, and bring about a change in tone. They are the father and daughter duo of Damon (Nicolas Cage) and Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz). Over the past few years, Damon has been training his young daughter (who has just turned 11) to be the perfect killing machine. She's been trained in just about every weapon and martial art known to man, and on her birthday, he surprises her with a pair of deadly knives. The apartment they share is also filled with just about every automatic weapon you can think of lining the walls. All of this is in preparation for Damon's big plan. He has a personal score to settle with the crime boss, Frank D'Amico, and plans to start a war against the entire crime family. They too both don superhero personas, he dressing up as a Batman-wannabe called "Big Daddy", and she as his pint-sized assassin sidekick "Hit Girl", whose outfit conceals various hidden weapons. Their style of seeking justice is very different from Kick-Ass. They don't seek glory or attention. They prefer to just swoop in, take the criminals off guard, and murder them mercilessly before anyone knows what happened. The scenes of violence in the film are indeed brutal, and may catch some off guard. How you react to the sight of a young child slicing up a room full of men will play a big part in your enjoyment of this movie.

As for me, I was not offended, but I did become a little confused. With the arrival of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, the movie loses its sarcastic and smart tone, and seems to try to be aiming for a more Quentin Tarantino vibe of combining off the wall humor with graphic, sometimes horrifying violence. And yet, the movie seems to want things both ways. Whenever the movie is focused on Dave/Kick-Ass and his friends, the movie goes back to its Apatow feel. This results in a something that feels like it's being pulled in two different directions. While I never lost interest, I did grow tired of the movie's constant tonal shifts whenever a character walked on the screen. Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn (Stardust) never quite finds a balance between the film's two extremes. This leads to an uneven final product that has a lot of great individual moments, but never quite came together as a whole for me.

Am I saying that this is a bad movie or that you should not see it? Not at all. Like I said, the film is often very funny. And there are a lot of great moments or individual scenes. But there are too many problems on display for me to fully recommend it. One big drawback is the character of Kick-Ass himself. He's not that interesting the way he's portrayed here, nor does he have much of a personality, either in or out of costume. In fact, it's the duo of Big Daddy and Hit Girl who do most of the major action for a majority of the film. Yes, Kick-Ass takes his place in the third act, and finally gets to live up to his name, but before then, I was finding it a little hard to get excited about anything that concerned him. The movie also could have been trimmed by about 15 or 20 minutes with no sacrifice. There's a long middle section that sort of drags, and doesn't introduce that much that we haven't seen before. I never lost interest, but it did sometimes feel like the movie was spinning its wheels or padding for time.
The ending hints at a lot of possibilities for a sequel, and I hope it gets a chance to exploit them. I would love to see the characters taken further and meet their full potential. As a stand-alone film, Kick-Ass is a flawed, but interesting start to a potential franchise. There's a lot that's done right here, and there's a lot of room for improvement. A sequel can take advantage of that. Let's hope they get a chance to do it, and let's hope they don't waste the opportunity.

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