Kick-Ass 2 | Little White Lies

Kick-Ass 2

13 Aug 2013 / Released: 14 Aug 2013

Two young adults, a man and a woman, sitting together at a table and drinking from mugs. They appear to be having a conversation in a casual setting.
Two young adults, a man and a woman, sitting together at a table and drinking from mugs. They appear to be having a conversation in a casual setting.
2

Anticipation.

To say that this sequel was unasked for would be something of an understatement.

2

Enjoyment.

The most conventional revisionist comic book movie ever!

1

In Retrospect.

We wish this left a sour taste in the mouth, instead it leaves nothing.

The juve­nile com­ic book dirty bomb gets a sequel, and it’s a bit of a stinker…

Jim Car­rey washed his hands of Kick-Ass 2, cit­ing what he saw as the film’s exces­sive lev­els of vio­lence as a way to exon­er­ate him­self from hit­ting the stump on the glob­al pub­lic­i­ty trail. Sight unseen, most dis­missed Carrey’s actions as strange­ly douchey. They gave rise to a cho­rus of whined procla­ma­tions stress­ing that the con­se­quence-free screen vio­lence in the day-glo Kick-Ass uni­verse exists in the twin­kle-eyed realms of fan­ta­sy and any­one who deigns to extract any social or polit­i­cal sub­text from it is, well, a douche.

Anoth­er infer­ence from Carrey’s announce­ment was that this sequel had man­aged to trump the extreme inter­gen­er­a­tional blood-let­ting of the orig­i­nal film — you could sud­den­ly hear the sound of juve­nile lips being licked. Like The Sex Pis­tols and – to a less­er extent – The Wombles, the promise of the pro­fane or the taboo evokes undue, pos­si­bly even illog­i­cal lev­els of excite­ment. Could this be the super­hero vio­lence aria to end them all?

Not even close. The only thing Kick-Ass 2 proves is that Car­rey was so keen to dis­tance him­self from this span­dex mon­stros­i­ty that he was will­ing to make a short-term pub­lic fool out of him­self in order to save face for the long-term. See­ing the film, it’s clear that maybe the real rea­son he want­ed out was because the film he had co-starred in was actu­al­ly quite rubbish.

Writer-direc­tor Jeff Wad­low (poten­tial super­hero names: Doc­tor Inept, The Cel­lu­loid Char­la­tan, Cap­tain Clus­ter­fuck) appears to have absolute­ly no idea what he’s doing, what he wants to do and what he has done. At least in the first Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn was able to keep the cam­era fair­ly still so you could actu­al­ly wit­ness the com­bat scenes. Here for every bar­ney, the cam­era seems to get the ner­vous jit­ters and you lose all tem­po­ral and spa­cial sense of the scene. Plus, iron­i­cal­ly deployed chirpy pop punk is used on the sound­track, a tac­tic which was glib in the first film and now comes across as glib and unoriginal.

The film picks up where the last one left off then hasti­ly replays the whole putrid saga again, vir­tu­al­ly beat for beat. This time, Aaron Taylor-Johnston’s jim­my-jam-sport­ing doo­fus, Kick-Ass, embraces col­lec­tive action in order to max­imise the impact of his vig­i­lante escapades. Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), who was orphaned at the cli­max of the pre­vi­ous film, takes a sopho­moric detour into attempt­ing immer­sion with­in the high school cheer girl mass­es, though it’s not long before she’s giv­ing the prom queen invol­un­tary bow­el spasms in the mid­dle of the lunch room.

So there’s lots of wait­ing in the film, wait­ing for Hit-Girl to realise the fol­ly of her efforts, wait­ing for pimp-masked super vil­lain The Moth­er­fuck­er (Christo­pher Mintz-Plasse) to exact his revenge, and wait­ing for Kick-Ass to have a rea­son, any rea­son to do some­thing that doesn’t involve stand­ing around smirk­ing. And it’s all over-laid with an epi­cal­ly dull and earnest nar­ra­tion which sounds like it’s try­ing to fuse some kind of ratio­nale to the mayhem.

With its con­stant refrain of this isn’t a com­ic book – this is the real world!” you’d think the film was intend­ed as a real­ist cor­rec­tive to the roman­tic, ide­alised land­scape pre­sent­ed in the large pro­por­tion of com­ic book-movies. And yet, the sto­ry­line is so run-of-the-mill and pre­dictable that Kick-Ass 2 ends up feel­ing – despite its claims to the con­trary – like a most hoary, dashed-off pen­ny dread­ful imaginable.

Of all its faults, per­haps the most egre­gious is the strain of pur­port­ed­ly com­ic racism that runs through the film. It oper­ates on two lev­els: first­ly you have big­ot­ed char­ac­ters who blurt out nasty, sup­pos­ed­ly humor­ous racial stereo­types. Not just the vil­lains, the heroes too. And no, hav­ing anoth­er char­ac­ter chide them for being racist does not absolve you from the fact that you did it in the first place for a cheap laugh. Sec­ond­ly, there’s the strange coin­ci­dence that it’s only eth­nic minori­ties who get beat­en up. Asians and His­pan­ics are respon­si­ble for all crime and become punch­ing bags for Kick-Ass and his crew, a set-up made even more uncom­fort­able by the fact that Carrey’s tin-pot avenger is the patri­ot­ic, deeply reli­gious Cap­tain Stars and Stripes.

Redeem­ing fea­tures? Nope, we got noth­in’. It’s deeply dis­ap­point­ing more than it is dire, sim­ply because the film­mak­ers have made no per­ceiv­able effort to stray from the mild­ly suc­cess­ful for­mu­la of the first film. In short, Kick-Ass 2 nev­er once jus­ti­fies its large­ly deplorable existence.

You might like