Movie Review: ‘KICK-ASS 2’

The main criticism I hear for this thing is “mean spirited” and “excessively violent,” to which I say – did you even see the first movie?  Have you read the books?  Do you even work out, bro?  This IS Kick-Ass, after all; the name doesn’t exactly inspire warm and heroic thoughts.  Mark Millar’s comic series – or as Hollywood likes to class them up, “graphic novels” – is now starting a 3rd run, and it’s the 4th if you want to count the Hit Girl side run (which I thought was the best of the bunch thus far).  The first film seemed to function better than the books in a lot of ways, and as scatterbrained and unstructured as Matthew Vaughn’s film was, it turned out to be a highly enjoyable dark comedy with a decent following.  The cool idea was an average kid who decided to throw on a scuba suit and fight crime – he’s human, he can get seriously hurt, and other than titanium laced bones after a bad incident, he’s of human strength.  To top this, naturally people take notice and decide they can get in on this hero thing too…and likewise, some get dressed up for chaos and evil as well.  What the first film had in its favor was the sheer shock value of kids being violent, especially a certain boisterous young lady in leather and a purple wig.  Now that the novelty of a foul mouthed pre-teen taking off limbs and plugging holes into baddies has worn off, the question was how to top it…and the answer to that is, you don’t — you just try to make a decent follow up.

Director Jeff Wadlow had about zero credibility going in his favor.  His feature debut Cry_Wolf is remarkably poor and one of the last Scream coat-tail riders, and his follow up Never Back Down was a shallow Karate Kid update with poorly edited fight sequences.  After a five year stint in director jail, he’s helmed two episodes of the much better than expected Bates Motel series on A&E, and was (allegedly) hand-picked by Vaughn to direct the follow up to Kick-Ass.  Not really sure why, but the kid has a decent commercial eye.  Unfortunately he was also tapped to adapt Millar’s book and appeared to have very little interest in hanging onto some of the most memorable and insane moments, rather injecting some of his own misguided ideas instead.  He is a TERRIBLE writer.  A couple bad trailers showed up making the film look like a direct-to-video sequel, which didn’t help matters much.  Then Jim Carrey decided to press bomb the movie a few months ago, renouncing his appearance and refusing to promote the film…which only DID promote the film, but whatever, dude.  His gripe was with the violence depicted in the film, which not only was a major part of the script that he signed on to star in, but was a huge part of the original film which Carrey, a staunch gun-control advocate, claimed to love.  What’s ironic is that his character is a former mob enforcer who refuses to use a loaded gun, and he does a nice job blending into the role (which there’s very little of).  His most memorable moment from the books, for those that have read it, is tame and castrated – it was the one scene I was most looking forward to an audience reaction from, and it was completely absent.  Good job, Wadlow.

While it would appear that there was a lot going against Kick-Ass 2, I went in with relatively low expectations, which may explain why I found myself enjoying it a bit.  It’s a bad film, no way around that, but not without a few redeeming qualities. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is obviously having a blast turning his faux-heroic Red Mist into the super villain named The Motherfucker, even if a lot of his overacting joke attempts fall flat.  The characters are still quirky, the humor dark, the Justice Forever team is perfectly cast and realized, and the costumes are predominantly great.  Major props for sticking to the design and feel of the massive Ukrainian convict Mother Russia. Her 6’6”, buff build versus Hit Girl’s tiny frame is as effective as it was in the book, and the climactic fight ALMOST comes close to being great…and then the editor destroys all suspense and pacing of the thing. It’s an awful mess and jumps from scene to scene with no real rhythm or flow, and as I said earlier the writing is just awful.  This isn’t going to do any favors for getting a third film made unless it does big business overseas, and most would rather see Hit Girl on her own than be covered by the wet blanket of Kick-Ass himself. If you’re on the fence it’s better to preserve your fond memories of Vaughn’s original chapter and pretend this sequel didn’t happen.