Kick-Ass 2 lacks the charm of the original
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz. Rated 14A. Now playing
Kick-Ass came out of nowhere and did just that. It was an indie film about a high-school outcast who dons a ridiculous green unitard to become a superhero, and it felt fresh, comic-book–cranked, and genre-booting.
So why does the intermittently amusing, graphically ultraviolent sequel feel so much the opposite—like it’s gotten its own ass kicked?
Somehow it’s lost its key Superbad sensibility, with likable dweeb Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) at its core. When the movie begins, he has hung up his Kick-Ass suit but gets lured back into crime-fighting by perky Mindy (Chloë Grace Moretz). The story shifts largely to her: the pint-sized masked Hit Girl who stole the show in the first Kick-Ass is now a hormonal 15-year-old orphan.
Meanwhile, Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s spoiled brat reinvents himself as the supervillain named--yes--the Motherfucker, wearing bondage gear, chains, and feathers. When he forms a team of evildoers, Dave hooks up with a wannabe-superhero team led by camo-wearing Colonel Stars and Stripes (an almost unrecognizable Jim Carrey).
A lot of the plot concerns Mindy as she tries to leave her nunchakus behind and fit in with a bunch of, like, totes boy-band–loving mean girls at school. Aside from her delivering the odd amputation, her story feels rote. Totes rote.
It’s not Carrey (an obvious stand-in for the original’s outsized Nicolas Cage) who owns the big laughs here but Mintz-Plasse, a psychopathic wimp who thinks it’s bad-ass to don his mom’s old S & M gear and call himself Motherfucker. And check out his band of baddies, led by the hilarious Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina), who looks like a Soviet weightlifting-team reject in a red bikini.
With scenes like theirs, Kick-Ass 2 gets close to the outrageous satire it so desperately wants to be, but it constantly gets sidetracked by oversentimentalized (albeit totally random) deaths of loved ones, tired high-school antics, and pointless carnage.
In the end, it can’t decide if it wants to send up or salute superhero flicks.
Comments
4 Comments
Lorak G. Selrak
Aug 17, 2013 at 1:51pm
Actually, the original was one of the most obscene glorifications of violence I've ever seen. It was about children being violent to other people just for the fun of it. I couldn't believe that this was permitted. It should have been rated XXX or not produced to begin with.
Hard-core porn would have been much less damaging to the minds and spirits of children than this movie was. That they've made a sequel is really sad for what it says about Hollywood and our values.
Ron Y
Aug 17, 2013 at 9:03pm
@Lorak
You're entitled to your opinion.
Me, I thought that Kick-Ass was relatively sane about violence. One of the points it made, at least for me -- and I'm not one of those people who thinks he is right all the time or even most of the time -- is that vigilantism hurts and that dressing up as a superhero leads to problems.
The main character, Dave, is repeatedly assaulted and permanently nerve-damaged. HitGirl's father is gruesomely tortured to death and she is left an orphan.
That is not nice stuff, that is not the characters reveling in the happiness of their lives, in the joy of violence.
This, to me, is outrageous comic book violence as it *ought* to be shown: painful, with unintended consequences (the heroes wind up creating their archvillain).
And, yes, they started out thinking that it would be fun. To me, they learned that it wasn't fun.
As for damage to children, I have a much greater beef with Hansel and Gretel, surely the ugliest story for children ever written.
Lorak G. Selrak
Aug 18, 2013 at 9:09am
Ron Y.
It's funny how commentaries on violence always include violence as a supposed commentary on that violence. Sort of like commentaries on rape that Include real rape.
Ron Y
Aug 18, 2013 at 12:05pm
I don't know that it's true that all commentaries include the subject matter. Moreover, simulated violence isn't (to my mind) on the same level of offense as real violence.
My point is that Kick-Ass is arguably less gratuitous than many or even most violent films, because it focuses on painful and bloody consequences of a certain way of thinking in a way that, say, Saturday morning cartoon shows can't or won't. To me, that is the entire point of Kick-Ass: that being a real-life superhero is tougher than you'd think from reading comic books.
My point is not that Kick-Ass isn't a violent movie. With kids in it. Or that you shouldn't be offended by that; fair enough, fair enough.