Kick Ass - W.T.F.
I know alot of you guys don't read comics and didn't read Kick Ass before seeing the film.
Kick Ass, as a comic, did indeed as one reviewer put it, gave comics a kick in the ass. DC and Marvel, the two main giants of the comics industry were and still are concerned with giant crossovers and cosmic scale arcs that kill characters then bring them back then have them make deals with the devil so time gets rebooted or whatever. They forgot about the craft to an extent, concerned about the next big event. They relate to their audience about as much as beef stew does to icecream.
Kick Ass did what Spider Man did, made the hero much more real. Spider Man was one of the first, if not the first, superhero to have real life problems. Dave aka Kick Ass did the same, by the time the first eight issues were over, sure he'd gotten even with Red Mist for screwing him over and Hitgirl had revenged herself, but he didn't get the girl, in fact the girl despised him and was sending him obscene visual messages via mobile about how much she was enjoying sex with someone other than him, something he always wanted and never got to achieve. Big Daddy never had his wife killed, he was in it for the same reason Kick Ass was..the love of comics. He wanted his daughter to have a real life adventure instead of being a consumer clone eating helpings of Idol and Hanna Montana.
The people who were heroes were also "losers", the bullied and the non-achievers, which is one of the things that made both Spider Man and Kick Ass such great comics, they directly identified themselves with the guys reading them, for the most part.
The film decided apparently that this wouldn't fly and kicked it all the curb for the second half of the film [the first half sticking closely to the source material] in favour of cartoon violence, big explosions and clichés. Now I know that those things sell films and indeed it worked....but why if you're going to call a film by the name of the book swerve then so violently away from one of the core themes? I stupidly though they weren't going to do it, not with this and....they did.
So 5/10. It would have been higher if I'd not read the book first or if they'd not given this the same name as the thing it was based on.