I wanted to like Kick-Ass.

I like hyperviolence. I like irony. I like post-modern sensibilities. I like satire. I like comic books. I like Matthew Vaughn. I like themes. I like statements. I like chicks who kick ass.

A lot to like here.

And a lot that fails to come together for me. Movie starts strong, and ends tiresome. Very tiresome. Is it weird that by the end, I found myself bored?

Two problems with the film that I can see (note, spoilers ahead, awooga, awooga):

First problem is the problem with the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character, or VP, can be one of those protagonists that is more a witness to the story than the prime mover of the story. It’d be like a Superman movie told from the perspective of Lois Lane (as opposed to a Lois Lane movie told from the perspective of Lois Lane). It’s not a bad thing in and of itself. You can make the viewpoint character do good things. You can have the character’s own fortunes and fears be tied to that of the focal character’s — and you can have the VP be changed by the events that unfold around him.

That’s not really the case with Kick-Ass. The main character, Dave — or the titular “Kick-Ass” (hee, titular!) — isn’t a very interesting dude. He doesn’t give off a strong motivation. He doesn’t have a compelling story — he is, in fact, a mostly blank page, a fact which the character even states in the beginning. He’s a nobody. Nothing special happens to him. It’s not his story. It’s the story of Hit Girl and Big Daddy. (Even Red Mist is a more compelling character.) It’s a weird mix, because Dave, our main character, is basically peripheral — and yet, the most peripheral characters are the ones who should be our main characters. It’s their story that matters. It’s their story that drives the plot. That has real motivation. That compels us to keep watching. And yet, that story is kept to the margins as Dave’s dull world is put front and center.

And his motivation to become a superhero — really, a masked vigilante — is dubious at best. This ain’t Charles Bronson in Death Wish, yo. His only motivation that we can see is that the same relatively non-threatening thugs steal his money, phone, and comic books from time to time (pro-tip, kid, don’t walk down that alley anymore, or maybe find a comic book store that isn’t in the middle of Stringer Bell’s territory from The Wire). He makes some mumble-mouthed proclamation that people watch crime and do nothing, which is interesting philosophically, but that’s not a reason enough for him to dress up in pajamas like a crazy person and try to stop crime.

Which leads us to believe that Dave is kind of a lunatic. Maybe not a sociopath, but a psychopath.

And that’s interesting. The story can run with that.

The story, of course, does not run with that.

Which leads us to our second problem.

Second problem is that the film pretends to be about these maladjusted miscreants in the real world that pretend that this kind of life is a viable one. This plays well for the first act. Actually, it plays really well, and I had high hopes. Here’s this fucked up nobody whose first outing as the masked vigilante (spoiler warning) ends in him getting stabbed in the gut and then hit by a car. His second outing isn’t him winning because he’s a really cool martial artist, but because he’s just crazy enough in his devotion to “protect the innocent” that he actually scares off the bad guys. He’s fucking batshit, and they can sense it.

Further, we catch whiffs of how fucked up the Big Daddy and Hit Girl story really is — I mean, let’s be clear, he trains his little girl to be something akin to a serial killer. Some of her victims in the movie are not ones that necessarily deserve to die (the car-crushing scene comes to mind). She’s gleeful when she murders. Glib lines. Girly smirk. That’s fucked up.

And that’s okay that it’s fucked up. I like that. You can start seeing themes in there of, “We push our kids to grow up too fast,” or, “We willfully stunt the growth of our children,” or, “Our kids are brainwashed by their own parents.” That’s cool. I dig it. We’re in a real world where nuance matters, and yet these characters fail to recognize nuance. Awesome. Hot. High-five, movie!

But that never pays off.

In fact, the movie becomes more and more a comic book fantasy (married to the ethos of a Tarantino film but without the heart or joy that Tarantino possesses) as it progresses. It falls into all-too-familiar tropes. No character struggles with the moral quandary. Hit Girl, even after all the horrors she witnesses, never once seems to be a little girl. The bad guy is so bad, he’s just a dick — nothing sympathetic about him. Big Daddy is basically a brainwashing psychopath parent, but outside a single very peripheral character (the cop, Marcus), nobody calls him on it. Nobody is self-aware. Nuance is lost. They’re all just heroes and villains, and what we think might provide us with satirical beats (or at least offer us turning points for these characters) instead gives us the same-ol-same-ol. The entire third act is essentially a comic book wank-fest where these dubious, fucked-up characters are rewarded for their psychotic breaks from reality. (Another, larger spoiler, awooga, awooga: after Big Daddy dies, Hit Girl is not faced with a quandary, and is not made to see that this is the result of the totally fucking gonzo batshit life they’ve lived — no, she steely decides to finish the job her father started with no real recognition that this little girl just lost her only parent. It’s alienating and strange, and worst of all, utterly unbelievable.)

This is all fine, if that’s the kind of movie you’re making.

But it’s not.

It begins with one premise and ends with another, and in the middle is just a muddy broth.

Is it a bad movie? Not at all. It’s just a very confused one, and for me that really popped my Kick-Ass bubble. The direction is great. The acting is pretty spot on. The movie is funny where it needs to be. The action scenes are rock solid. So, you might enjoy it. I didn’t, sadly. All these great elements felt separate from one another, tied together by nothing, moored to nothing, anchored to nothing. What could’ve been a classic ends up flat like soda sitting long on the counter.

By the way, if you like Matthew Vaughn, I cannot say enough good things about Layer Cake.