Movie Review - Kick-Ass 2

One of my most anticipated films of last year, which quickly diminished to expected disappointment after the reviews came out. I ended up not seeing Kick-Ass 2 while it was in theaters and only just now got around to watching it. I know it's pretty late now to effect anyone going to see it now, but I figured that since I watched it, I'd write about it.

I was a big fan of the first Kick-Ass from 2010, though I do easily acknowledge that is has it's own problems. The first half of Kick-Ass is a fantastic satirical look at the origin stories of superheros and how they would look set in a real life environment. Then, about halfway through, it just becomes the kind of movie it's satirizing. That isn't to say it's bad, but it switches tone from funny and violent superhero parody to violent and dark superhero film. I still enjoy watching it, but I feel it could have been better. I never did read the comic, though I have wanted to. Amidst stories stating that the book was finished at the same time as the movie, I figured I'd get the same basic story from watching the movie. Later I found out a lot of people like the movie more because it's somehow more reserved than the comic. The movie does have a lot of fun moments and it's action is as enjoyable as it is violent. The actors all put in great performances, especially Nicolas Cage, who was unbeknownst to the cast and crew at the time doing an Adam West impersonation. Chloe Grace Moretz did a fantastic job and Aaron Taylor-Johnson did a pitch-perfect rendition of what I always hope Spider-Man will be, though less smart and more of a loser. The soundtrack uses a few songs from The Prodigy's album Invaders Must Die multiple times and they help give the movie some music motifs along with the movie's score. It's also shot and edited very well, it's infinitely watchable.

I said all that about the first film to make this one point; Kick-Ass 2 has hardly, if any, of these qualities. The writing is stupid, the cinematography is bland, and the soundtrack generic. The acting from Chloe Grace Moretz is still great, in fact, better than ever, but it's hard to recognize that when you just get bogged down with so much stupid.

The main plot of this film is Dave Lizewski coming to terms with what it means to be a superhero. As we start the film, he's angsty and frustrated that all these superheros have come out because of what he did, but he's promised to not be Kick-Ass again for the sake of his worrying girlfriend. Mindy Macready has taken to skipping school every day and hanging out in her dad's lair, training up her superhero skills. When Dave decides he needs to be Kick-Ass again he tries to recruit Mindy but due to her new parental figure telling her he won't tolerate her being Hit-Girl, she continuously says she's out of the game. We spend the rest of the movie with Dave meeting up with the Supergroup Justice Forever and him trying to bring Hit-Girl in while Mindy holds out and tries to be a normal high school girl. At the same time, Chris D'amico who was one time faux-hero Red Mist has decided to become the world's first actual supervillian.

That basic plot isn't bad. We spend a lot of the first movie showing how woefully unprepared for the superhero life Dave is. He's a bare minimum hero that is essentially a figurehead while people like Hit-Girl and Big Daddy do actual work. It makes sense that in this movie he's retired. At best he was a figurehead for the superhero movement, but at worst he was a catalyst for a lot of bad things happening to people around him. We also spend a lot of time with him trying to win the affections of a girl who admired Kick-Ass, but made him promise to stop once they were together because she cared about him too much. So we open this movie with Dave saying he can't be a superhero because of his girlfriend. He then does nothing but try and get back in the game from there on out and ignores the wishes of his girlfriend. When she sees Dave and Mindy talking together often in the halls and witnesses a conversation out of context, she immediately thinks Dave is cheating on her, which...would make a lot of sense. However, when asked to explain himself right then and there he doesn't, which makes sense because they're in a crowded hall in a public place. But he...then never tries to explain to her in private that it was about superhero business and that she was Hit-Girl and nothing was going on and they just break up. A relationship that was one of the primary focuses of the first movie is just thrown aside. Once we meet Justice Forever you can figure out why.

So already we've lost one of the primary focuses of the first movie, his girlfriend, which he worked pretty damn hard for in the first film. And she's gone in the first half hour and that's the last we see of her. Then there's the focus on Dave's friends. Clark Duke gets a pretty good role in this film, about as good as the first one, and he gets about all the same one liners as he did before. Unfortunately his other friend Todd just gets absolutely screwed. In the first film, Todd, played by Evan Peters, is just as equally Dave's friend as Clark Duke's character Marty is. In this film, Evan Peters was busy filming American Horror Story, so they recast Todd and made him one of the worst damn things of this movie. Todd went from every bit of Dave and Marty's equal to being just shy of mentally retarded. You don't understand why Dave and Marty would hang out with this guy in the first place, and it makes sense later why they'd stop hanging out with him, even if they were being jerks about it. This leads to one of the dumbest things in the whole movie, but it spoils a whole lot of the end so I'll save that for later.

When we get introduced to the Supergroup Justice Forever, it's mostly just sad and not the funny you want it to be. They went the serious route with everyone except Marty who is now a clone of Captain America in costume, and Donald Faison's Doctor Gravity. Colonel Stars and Stripes, played by Jim Carrey becomes the Hit-Girl violence replacement for the time he's on screen. A former gangster inforcer who is a born-again Christian. The rest of the team includes a girl who's sister was an unsolved murder, a husband and wife who's young son went missing and never found and a gay guy who was bullied and decided to step up for those who can't stand up for themselves. Donald Faison's Doctor Gravity is a guy who just wants to go and do cool superhero shit and goof around. See the difference here? Doctor Gravity, Colonel Stars and Stripes, Marty and Kick-Ass all feel like they're fun, goofy characterizations of superheros that would fit with the light-hearted but violent tone the first half of the first movie takes. The rest of them are all these super grim and depressing characters that don't feel like they exactly belong in this world. Well, either they belong or the others don't. Having both exist is what feels weird.

The introduction of Night Bitch is the whole reason they got rid of Katie, so Dave could start hooking up with her as Kick-Ass. They spend a good amount of time cementing how close they are as a replacement relationship for Dave, but then when a certain event happens about mid-way through the film, they just drop it.

Jim Carrey's performance as Colonel Stars and Stripes is wonderful. Apparently he's only on screen for roughly 8 minutes of an hour and forty minute movie, but he's one of the most inspired characters of the whole thing. I wanted more of him. Along with Chloe Grace Moretz, I think he has the best performance of the movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson does what he can, but the writing is just not the same. In the first film he's a comic-book loving nerd who has the crazy notion that he could become a superhero and right some wrong-doings. In this movie he's just your standard boring superhero, but with even less motivation for half the things he does. Christopher Mintz-Plasse does a fine job as The Motherfucker, but he was just an older version of the same guy as the first movie, I expected nothing more or less from him.

The writing is awful. I already mentioned the destruction of Todd and Dave is hardly any better. Mindy gets fine writing treatment, but I think that's mostly because her sub-plot was already covered in a separate book that wasn't being published as the same time as the film was made. The rest of the movie though is just so dumb. For every good thing that the movie does for itself, it takes two steps back within minutes. They traded in the wit and common everyday man style dialogue for crass jokes. There is a device in this film that makes people vomit and shit themselves when it's pointed at them. Not only that, it's used for comedic effect and as an important game changing device. I hated every second on screen. The fact that they went through the trouble of making it look like a high school girl is violently uncontrollably shitting and vomiting in a school cafeteria is all I need to say about the quality of the writing. That would not have happened in the first movie. Sure, there were jokes about jerking off, but it's not like it showed you a geyser of jizz shooting out and that being the joke. It's hard for me to say that a joke about jerking off with Jergens and tissues is a refined joke, but in comparison to the shit (literally) in this film, it totally is.

Before I go into spoilers I'll say this. The cinematography is for the most part boring, the soundtrack is generic, the editing is nothing like the first film. It's just...all wrong. A lot of the acting takes a dive because they have nothing to work with and the plot is largely dumb. I still enjoyed the film, but it's not one that I will enjoy like Kick-Ass. It's one to watch for a continuation of the story when you need something dumb and violent on, but not something that can just be appreciated as a good film, because it's not. If you were a fan of the first movie, you'll probably still like this one, just not as much. Jim Carrey's performance is worth seeing however, and Chloe Grace Moretz does a fine job. The film has some interesting concepts but squanders them in search of crude humor. If you were midly interested, skip it. This one just barely makes the cut of an enjoyable film for me. I'll watch it again, but probably not by first choice. Maybe if a third one comes out I'll re-watch it. But it's nothing like the first movie.

Spoilers

I had so many problems with this movie that by the end I was just mad. They literally made Todd a bag of bricks. The plot needed something to bring Hit-Girl back, because Mindy was done with that. So what do they do? Why, they just have Todd walk into the fuckin' bad guy's lair and tell him who Kick-Ass is. I don't care if your two best friends are becoming famous superheros and they were being jerks to you, you don't go up to the nortiously bad, bad guy, who in a few scenes prior had a fuckton of cops murdered, and just tell him where your best friend is. The worst thing is, they don't play it like Todd's getting revenge on Dave. That would have still been dumb, but at least he reasoning is there. Instead, they just have him fuckin' tell him like he couldn't connect the dots. "Oh, you're looking for Kick-Ass? Yeah, that's a guy I know. Hey, you want to know who that guy is? I'll tell you because I've been one of his closest friends and you two should clearly meet up and have a chat. I did a good thing just then, I tell you what." He gets Dave's dad killed which was totally unnecessary because they already gave Dave the anti-superhero origin story of his mom dying of like a brain tumor or something in the first movie. Now both his parents are dead because they needed a reason for Hit-Girl to get involved. Not only was it unneccessary, the death of Colonel Stars and Stripes served the exact same purpose for everyone except Hit-Girl. They did two deaths for the same exact reason except the first time was for all the other characters and the second time was just for Hit-Girl.

I did like the majority of Mindy's side story however. Her trying to fit in and be a normal girl and have it backfire when the other girls are Mean Girls ripoffs. It almost had a nice resolution too, with her deciding to be herself but still embrace her feminine side, and then she uses a poop machine on them. Then they brought the poop and vomit machine back for the final battle and it plays a part in saving someone's life. Utterly stupid.

One thing I never liked about the first movie was that Big Daddy "traced the location of Kick-Ass through his IP address through his postings on Myspace." That is not how that works, but I was able to forgive it because essentially it leads to nothing. In this movie, the police trace the location of Kick-Ass through his IP address through postings on Twitter. Come on. That's even less valid because Twitter is generally a mobile phone app. Unless he was posting only from his room there would be many more than one solid location from his postings, and a mobile device not on Wifi would use the IP Address of the nearest tower it is connecting to. Even then, you can't just look at a post and go "hmmm, this post came from here!" Because IP addresses are based on an approximate location. You can track IP Addresses to neighborhoods, not houses. They find out where Kick-Ass lives and set Dave's dad on the path to death on something that does not happen.

The attempted rape scene I kind of liked, because it serves a purpose. Chris D'Amico is trying to be as stereotypically evil as he can but, but he being shown repeatedly just hiring people to do the dirty work for him. He attempts to commit an evil act such as rape and can't do it. I think that's a good character-building insight. I've heard that in the comic he actually does commit a rape and does many other evil things. I think that would have been a total misstep in the movie world. In the first movie Chris is never evil, just misguided because the person he looks up to most happens to be a very bad guy and when he gets caught in between being a hero and being the person his father was, he loses focus. His father does get murdered, that's enough to drive someone over the line between good and evil in my book. But in this movie you can tell that he's not truly evil, he just wants to do what he thinks is the way to exact revenge for the death of his father, by being the most bad guy he can be to counteract the most evil act he has ever witnessed.

The shark was the one of the dumbest things ever. You can't just say half a dozen times that the shark should be dead because he literally should be, and just have one character continuously state that it's just hungry. That doesn't make sense. They said exactly that it was in the wrong kind of water and it's implied it hasn't moved in days. It's a dead fucking shark. It's not hungry. It doesn't sit perfectly still in the wrong kind of water for days on end just because a character says it's hungry. So what does it do when The Motherfucker lands in the water in the end? It eats him because it was hungry. Fucking stupid. What's more, after the credits Chris D'Amico is revealed to not be dead, just that it ate his legs and his dick off. One last dick reference in the movie in case you forgot, and a totally implausible outcome to the situation. Everyone around him was dead except for the good guys, who did not take him out of the water. He falls into the shark tank and pools of blood come up. How could he have gotten out of there by himself? He couldn't have. They just couldn't kill him because he needed to be around for a third movie and also to make reference to not having genitals anymore.

This movie was stupid. It has it's fun moments but is greatly outweighed by the dumb and nonsensical. I went into this movie expecting a piece of shit, and I got a fun piece of shit. You've been warned.