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How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 14 August 2013
This article is a review of KICK-ASS 2. |
“Try to have fun; otherwise what’s the point?” Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey)
Opening on Dave Lizewski a.k.a. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) getting shot in the chest, though wearing a bulletproof vest, by Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), echoing the movie’s predecessor. Mindy has taken over from her father, the deceased Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), as the most lethal superhero on the streets of New York. There are plenty of reverberations from the first film, sometimes necessary to show some kind of grudging character progression, but its main use is lazy – to make the two main leads regress from their initial desire for adventure and justice, and instead take turns to question whether they are on the correct path.
Opening on Dave Lizewski a.k.a. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) getting shot in the chest, though wearing a bulletproof vest, by Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), echoing the movie’s predecessor. Mindy has taken over from her father, the deceased Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), as the most lethal superhero on the streets of New York. There are plenty of reverberations from the first film, sometimes necessary to show some kind of grudging character progression, but its main use is lazy – to make the two main leads regress from their initial desire for adventure and justice, and instead take turns to question whether they are on the correct path.
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KICK-ASS 2 uses origin themes of reticence again, which is annoying, as haven’t we already been there? The soul-searching works for anxiety-ridden THE DARK KNIGHT trilogy, but here there is merely the strong whiff of padding until we wait for Dave and Mindy to rediscover their zeal for punishing the bad guys, disappointingly not happening until the climax.
Kick-Ass has effectively gone into retirement, concentrating on high school. In his wake, he has inspired numerous ordinary citizens to don masks and go out into the streets to wreak vigilante justice. Hit-Girl, now in the care of Big Daddy’s cop best bud Detective Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), bunks off school to train, convincing Dave to join her. Hence the bullet to the chest. To harden him up. Marcus soon discovers what she’s up to, and makes her promise to quit; which she does and a subplot arises involving high school douche bags. The recurrence of pledging to parent and guardian figures is a clunky device to keep these two from putting villainy in a hurt locker. So, to summarise, the plot is a bit duff.
What keeps KICK-ASS 2 sporadically, guiltily entertaining is the casual and gratuitous comic book sadism. Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl have no qualms about proportionality. When Mindy hangs up her cape, Dave joins a group led by Carrey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes, whose weapon of a choice is a baseball bat and an Alsatian. Then there’s Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who jettisons his former guise as Red Mist and becomes super-villain The Motherf*****, leading a brutal gang, happy to use a lawnmower or a shark as an instrument of wrath. Chris is focused on vengeance for what Kick-Ass did, “You blew up my dad with a bazooka.” He has his own journey, peppered with violent incompetence.
The denouement doesn’t touch the skyscraper scrap in KICK-ASS. Director Jeff Wadlow is no Matthew Vaughn, who himself shows verve inconsistently. More disconcertingly is the treatment of women in KICK-ASS 2; it is grim in places, saving itself from abhorrence by making several cast members bad-asses, and actually the two most skilful, resourceful characters are women. The film’s tone is a mess, almost as if three different films have been joined together haphazardly. Stick around to the end of the credits; if there’s a number three, let’s hope it focuses on the strengths of its predecessors and thoroughly jettisons their weaknesses.
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