Review: Kick-Ass 2

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is back as Dave, but when we first meet him here, he has hung up his Kick-Ass costume to return to normal teenage life. But it just doesn’t feel right, he decides to seek out Hit Girl, AKA Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz), who is now 15, and her vigilante activities are getting hard for her guardian Marcus (Morris Chestnut) to contain. Dave wants to team up with Mindy, but before they can start training together, Marcus gets wise to what’s going on and puts a stop to it. Mindy ends up falling into line with the societal norms of high school life…puberty and joining a clique! This leaves Dave looking for a sidekick, and the ultra-lame Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison), who introduces Dave/Kick-Ass to a team of superheroes led by the gruff Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), whilst also hooking up with the spunky Night Bitch (Lindy Booth). Meanwhile the former Red Mist, AKA rich twit Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is still nursing a grudge against Kick-Ass, and has rebranded himself The Motherfucker. He uses his inheritance to try and hire a team of super badass supervillain cohorts. John Leguizamo turns up as the personal assistant his late mother (a sadly underused Yancy Butler) assigned him.

 

I wasn’t a huge fan of the original film, but it had less to do with moral objections (Hit Girl’s very real use of the c-word bothered me more than the staged violence) and more that it was an uneven film, and frankly not even all that original. Well now comes this sequel from 2013, written and directed by Jeff Wadlow (“Cry Wolf”, “Never Back Down”) and…it’s about on par with the first film, which was pretty much par itself. There’s sadly no Nic Cage as a fat “Batman” in this one, but Christopher Mintz-Plasse is once again very funny as the stupid and petulant rich kid turned stupid and petulant super-villain, this time called The Motherfucker. Yep. He really is the new Stephen Geoffreys, though I’d advise him against going full-throttle down the same career path. If you know Geoffreys, you know why. He might even be better in this than in the first film, he’s certainly the highlight. The new outfit for The Motherfucker is absolutely brilliantly ridiculous, bravo right there.

 

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is as he was last time out (meh), but Chloe Grace Moretz is older, more accomplished, and far easier to stomach as Hit Girl than last time. The character is 15 now, and frankly should’ve been in the first place. I didn’t find the character terribly shocking the first time, but she’s certainly more palatable at age 15. Hit Girl falling prey to cliques and pubescent desire is really quite clever. I normally can’t stand Morris Chestnut, but seeing his character try to play Cliff Huxtable (or Carl Winslow, perhaps more accurately) to a teenage girl who is also a violent superhero/vigilante is somehow very funny to me. Less funny is the returning Clark Duke, who needs a new act yesterday. Every time I see him I either want to punch him or yell ‘Stranger Danger!’. There’s just something creepy about him (I didn’t even like him on “Greek”, a show I swear I’ve never even heard of), though he’s probably a genuinely nice guy. Donald Faison makes for an amusingly lame sidekick to Kick-Ass, however.

 

Meanwhile, if Comic-Con were anything like the final fight in this film, it might be fun to go. It’s the only good action scene in a film where Wadlow and DP Tim Maurice Jones (who did much better work on “The Woman in Black”) favour shaky-cam nonsense. It makes most of the action awful to look at. Other drawbacks include the waste of John Leguizamo in an unfunny role, and more substantially, a completely disappointing and uninteresting Jim Carrey in a role perhaps better suited to Henry Rollins. Let’s face it, Carrey regrets making this movie because a) Hindsight is a bitch, and real life gun-related violence does bad things to a movie’s image, and b) He’s boring in it. He was uneven as The Riddler, but he’s still talented and it’s really disappointing he didn’t nail this.

 

The film will be easier to stomach for people who objected to Hit Girl last time (though why no one had any problems with the title vigilante also being a high-schooler is awesome hypocrisy right there), but at the end of the day, this is just as uneven as the first film. It’s watchable.

 

Rating: C+