“Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool?” asks Roger Ebert in the lede of his scathing review for Mathew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, opening today. Obviously it's a rhetorical question—the one being inevitable, the other not really befitting an established 67-year-old critic—but it casts a deliberately invidious judgment that's not just directed at the film. Ebert here and elsewhere in the piece boldly insinuates that if you can appreciate Kick-Ass' rock-'em-sock-'em violence, you're likely shallow, blinkered, and bereft of genuine human emotions.

He continues: “Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point?” I haven’t seen the film, but have seen countless clips and trailers, and think I can safely answer the question: yes and yes. The bug up Ebert’s butt, of course, is the violence dispensed here by adolescent crime-fighting wunderkind, Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), who terminates no end of villains in an incredibly violent manner. Moretz, who steals the movie I’m told, was eleven at the time of the shoot, and it’s her foul-mouthed, gun-toting antics that have become the film’s biggest talking point.

“This isn't comic violence,” Ebert writes. “These men, and many others in the film, are really stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children that age would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?” Is he joking? It’s one thing to disparage the trendy comic-book-ification of recent movies, and another altogether to say you don’t like a comedy because it isn’t a drama. And since when have superheroes of any age paused to consider the deeper meaning of a few dead henchmen?

Yes, it’s transgressive to have a young female character portrayed as a non-stop killing machine, but no more so than it is absurd, and therein lies the zest of the comedy. Ebert, immune to it, rather thinks the whole affair promotes youth violence. “When kids in the age range of this movie's home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.” This is just embarrassing, the kind of narrow, fustian moralizing that leads people to things like editing the “objectionable” violence from Roadrunner cartoons. Kids have played at "war" and other such such violent diversions since time immemorial, and no motion picture that I know of ever handed out guns to children. Ebert's qualms notwithstanding, I'm betting it's possible to like Kick-Ass and not be an apathetic asshole.