Well, since the film makes avenging her mother's death Hit-Girl's entire motive, I don't see how they could have. I also think we might have started thinking less of Hit Girl if she was motivated merely by crime-fighting. She is quite the brutal 11-year-old adorable killing machine.

Hit Girl is motivated by her father's warped parenting. Big Daddy was motivated by revenge for her mother but I already think nothing good about him as a person (accepting that the idea of him is cool in a warped comic book sensibility).

This one is for you Flippy:

BTW, I don't agree that Hit-Girl was motivated by her dad's warped upbringing. Again, A COMEDY. Not a realistic portrayal of a dangerous and dysfunctional upbringing (that so many absurd critics are claiming).

So I saw her motivation as shared with her dad to avenge her mom, and also later to avenge her dad - but continuing their shared mission to avenge her mom.

Just a side note- I haven't seen this movie yet- but my little nephew Utah has CIPA. Keeps his mom on her toes, that's for sure. It doesn't help that he's fearless (never feeling pain can do that for you) and probably ADD or ADHD just a tad bit.... she has her hands full.

Hooray for DVD release.

So, regardless of whether you tell me it's a comedy or a serious comic book movie, all I can say is that by the end of the film I was definitely feeling meh about the whole thing.

That's saying a lot since I loved the gory action, the teenager stuff, and Kick Ass himself. Even the setups for some of the stuff that ended weakly - Red Mist's crime family, Big Daddy's Adam West fetish - were great. Something went really wrong along the way.

As soon as I started to think about it after the film I realized that Big Daddy's character completely unnerved me. He's supposed to be a hero? At best, he's a man driven insane by circumstances and has raised his daughter to be a demon for his own purposes...and at best, my reaction is one of sadness. Sure, during the action it's pretty awesome, but in truth the character left a bad taste in my mouth. By the time he's burning and his daughter is continuing to slaughter people I just wanted to turn away. I'd equate it to the uneasy feeling I got while watching the protagonist of The Hurt Locker having sh.tty interactions with his wife and child after being scarred by war. It's just a bummer.

Agreed with the above that they completely belie the "normal guy as superhero" concept and if their intent was to show that no, a normal guy can't be a superhero, they did a poor job of it.

Like I said I really dug most of it and was disappointed that it fell apart at the end. I love Christopher Mintz-Plasse as a foil and hoped for more villian-ness by the end. After he tried to save Kick-Ass and then watched the crap get beat out of him I hoped for more of an emotional reaction, or at least, a bit of emotion when his father dies. The end shot had the wrong beat, much like the rest of the film.

Oh well - here's hoping Scott Pilgrim is better.

I never read the comic either, but I thought the movie suffered from the same thing a lot of comic adaptations suffer from (Watchmen come to mind) - story compression. I could tell that there was a LOT left out for the sake of time. We saw Kick-Ass take out 1 set of street thugs, and the BAM, smack in the middle of taking down an organized crime boss. As CP pointed out, Red Mist went from sympathetic to Kick-Ass and feeling betrayed by his father - to happily jumping up to run interference while his father tried to kill a little girl with nothing in between to change that. Clearly large chunks of action and motivation were missing that would have been in the comic book. That bugged me through most of the movie, making everything feel rushed and disjointed.

And I was kinda put off by the gore. I'm not as a rule put off by over the top comic book gore (for example, I LOVED Kill Bill Vol. 1), but in this context it felt over done and unnecessary.

Funny you should mention Watchman as an example of story compression. I, too, felt there was something seriously "missing" from that film ... but when I read the comic afterwards, I was surprised to find that - up until the octopus creature at the very end, if was pretty much filmed frame by frame - with barely one or two scenes left out of the film.

It just hit the wrong note with me, I guess. And Kick Ass just hit the right ones for me. Obviously YMMV, and that's cool - and more and more understandable as I am exposed to more varied reactions to the film.