What JJ delivered was a load of crap. I'll never get the love for ST 09.
The beginning - which everybody applauded - was maudlin.
The actors substituted "acting" for "poor impersonations" (Karl Urban was especially guilty of this).
Kirk had no development (jackass in the beginning, jackass in the end).
The villain and his plan sucked and made no sense.
There were contrivances on top of contrivances, an Orci and Kurtzman trademark (Old Spock being in the same cave that Kirk waltzed into on a barren ice planet, which coincidentally was where Scotty was stationed).
And it had Giacchino's worst score (the goddamn main motif repeats dozens of times).
EDIT: Oh and lens flare.
Damn son, maybe you just wanted to hate everything about the film. People will agree with you about how the second half was stupid, and there were stupid contrivances that probably had at least some fault being laid at the feet of the writers strike (no ability to smooth things over or do edits for a while there), but the film as a whole was a resounding success. Kirk DID develop as a character, he started out a wreck-less petulant thug that didn't believe in other people or anything but himself, and by the end of the movie ego was no longer his motivation. He accepted actual responsibility and came to believe in the concepts that Pike was talking about in the bar.
I thought the beginning was fairly well done. My only qualms would be how the Vulcan council was portrayed as bigoted.
And the acting was good, I'm not sure how you felt otherwise. Possibly because the script and director wanted to supercharge character traits that the characters were infamous for in pop culture, but weren't quite as overt as the general public remembers. That doesn't mean that it's bad acting, it just means that you had problems accepting the treatment of the characters in the film.
I do wish that they had worked in more 'you will experience fear', because Kirk never seemed afraid in the film. It would have been a good beat to have him be legitimately scared when he was about to drop onto the minninjg platform that was drilling into Vulcan, or at various other points.