I really enjoyed Hero, though the pacing needed to be evened out a bit. It was too slow in some places and frenetic in others. My daughter is a huge superhero/comics fan so I enjoyed the fact that the heroes were mocking the originals. The scene with Thom and his mother bothered me too, though it read to me as sarcasm. Overall I got the sense that Perry's goal was to poke fun at the genre and stereotypes in it, but then it could have been the mindset I went into it with as I tease the kid too.