Review by Ben Bussey
There’s nothing quite like a sequel that doesn’t understand why the first film worked. Sometimes the exact same team gets back together on both sides of the camera – say, Ghostbusters 2, Men in Black 2, Highlander 2, or even (shudder) The Hangover Part 2 – and, lacking any real motivation beyond the money, they just go through the motions like last time, resulting in something of a similar shape and texture to what went before, but with barely a sliver of the soul. Ah, but when a new guy comes on board, reputedly a big fan of the first film and eager to do it justice, yet quickly reveals himself to have neither the skills of his predecessors, nor the critical appreciation of just what made the first film good: that’s a special kind of wrong. And that’s Jeff Wadlow’s Kick-Ass 2.
Okay – maybe I’m being too unkind there. Perhaps it’s fairer to say this is Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass 2. I can’t say categorically if that’s the case, not having read Millar’s second volume – but based on the first book, and what many trusted sources tell me about its sequel, I get the distinct impression this movie is considerably closer to Millar’s vision than the first Kick-Ass movie. And if so, then this is as good a case in point as any to demonstrate that sometimes, loyalty to the text isn’t all its cracked up to be.
Spoilers for the original Kick-Ass (both comic and movie) coming up – don’t worry, I’ll lay off anything too major from the new movie.
Here’s the thing about the original Kick-Ass comic – it’s a nasty piece of work. And I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s spiteful and mean-spirited from beginning to end, leaving a rancid taste in your mouth like week-old fried chicken that probably wasn’t even that trustworthy when it was first cooked. If filmed exactly as written, I find it very difficult to envisage Kick-Ass having won anything like the number of fans it ultimately amassed. The movie worked because of screenwriting duo Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, who kept the stuff from Millar’s book that really worked – Dave Lizewski’s everyman awkwardness and can-do attitude, Hit-Girl’s Tasmanian Devil energy and insanity – and amplified these. Then they took the uglier, crueller stuff (for which Millar seems to have quite the hard-on), and quite sensibly binned it. Rather than being humiliated at every turn and left jerking it to pictures of his dream girl sucking someone else’s dick (which she texted him), Dave actually gets the girl instead. Big Daddy meanwhile, rather than being a deranged sociopath with a completely invented backstory (and not even Hit Girl’s real dad), got to be a bona fide ex-cop and loving father, who – despite his little (ahem) quirks – really did have the best intentions for his daughter, and his city. And, of course, Vaughn and Goldman brought the jet pack.
This overriding optimism really brought Kick-Ass to life; it was great feel-good entertainment. Yes, it was ridiculously violent, and much of that violence was the handiwork of a little girl, but – whatever the claims of it being an examination of what might really happen if normal people attempted superheroism – it was ultimately a completely cartoonish fantasy, in no way reflective of reality, and all the better for it. Doubtless some will dispute this, complaining that Vaughn and Goldman declawed and sugar coated Millar’s vision, and Wadlow has done the source material justice by keeping it meaner and – wait for it – darker. Well, if that’s how you feel, Kick-Ass 2 is all yours. Rest assured this time around plenty of bad stuff will happen to those who don’t deserve it, none of it ultimately serving any ostensible greater good, and if you want to hail that as being more ‘real,’ then good for you I suppose.
Even without the tonal shift, though, Kick-Ass 2 falls right into that usual sequel trap of basically retracing the exact same steps as its predecessor. Where last time Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) started out daydreaming of becoming a superhero, now he’s quit and is daydreaming about becoming one again. Where gangster’s son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) was anxious to earn his dad’s respect and join the family business, here he’s desperate to be feared by basically everyone, thus renames himself The Motherfucker. Oh look, there’s another sequel trap Kick-Ass 2 falls into: contradicting that which went before, given Kick-Ass ended with the former Red Mist declaring his intention to become a supervillain, and yet the narrative picks up a few years later and he’s only just realised that’s what he wants to do. And so it goes: both guys don costumes and hit the streets, only to find it all gets a bit real. Then we get to the inevitable surrogate for Nicolas Cage’s Big Daddy: Jim Carrey’s Colonel Star & Stripes, who – after all that hullabaloo – turns out to be a fairly minor player in proceedings, and even though Carrey’s playing very much against type, he doesn’t really appear enough to make much of an impact.
The only stuff here that isn’t basically part of the existing blueprint is the plot thread centring on Mindy/Hit Girl. I had been particularly concerned how her scenes would play out, as considering she’s now in her mid-teens, there was always a huge risk of it getting a bit creepy. Happily, both Wadlow’s script and camera avoid sexualising Moretz, even whilst taking note of the hyper-sexualised teen culture into which Mindy is more or less unwillingly being inducted. The problem is, none of it’s particularly new or interesting, covering ground that’s long since been well documented in the likes of Heathers, Mean Girls and – my personal favourite – Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. Maybe if Mindy’s queen bitch nemesis Brooke (Claudia Lee, another under-18 who most definitely is sexualised) turned out to be in some way part of The Motherfucker’s nefarious (not to mention extremely non-specific) schemes, that might have lent it some weight; alas, beyond a really pathetically silly act of revenge that one can imagine Michael Bay pissing his pants laughing at, none of it goes anywhere. As kind of a side effect of that, The Motherfucker has to have a sadly underdeveloped henchwoman dubbed Mother Russia (the imposing Olga Kurkulina), just so Hit Girl has someone to fight in the finale.
That’s pretty much the problem with Kick-Ass 2 in a nutshell: basically everything that occurs is an arbitrary set-up by which we can justify violence later on. This includes the moment which, outside of Carreygate, would seem to be the biggest cause of controversy in the movie: the rape scene, apparently toned down from its equivalent in the comic and treated as a joke at the would-be rapist’s expense. Misguided doesn’t even cover it, and once more it’s painfully clear that the assaulted character – yet another totally underdeveloped, two dimensional new arrival – is there for no other purpose than to give Kick-Ass another motive to seek revenge. Very sloppy, very stupid.
All this said, though, I don’t mean to suggest Kick-Ass 2 is by any means an outright disaster. The core cast all do their best with what they’ve got, and the action sequences are for the most part pretty well done, suggesting Wadlow might have a decent future doing straight-up action flicks. I just hope he’s kept from writing his own scripts in future, as that’s where Kick-Ass 2 really pales in comparison to its predecessor; where Vaughn and Goldman brought real warmth, humanity and wit, Wadlow (or, again, maybe Millar) seem anxious to cater to your average thirteen year old boy’s notion of what constitutes great comedy and storytelling (hurhur, she said ‘snatch;’ hurhur, his dick got bitten). Sure, that hormonally imbalanced little misanthrope within us all may find Kick-Ass 2 a fairly satisfactory experience, but on the whole there’s surely no avoiding how half-baked and by-the-numbers it all is. Kick-Ass worked perfectly well as a standalone movie; methinks that’s probably how it should have stayed.
Kick-Ass 2 is in cinemas pretty much everywhere now, from Universal.