Really Jim Carrey? You're going to dawg
out your own movie 'Kick Ass 2' for being too violent?
Come man, that's not cool. Wait a minute, I'm getting a
text from Mr. Carrey right now, because we're tight like that…
and he's telling me to watch the movie first then pass
judgment on him. Fair enough. And now that I've
seen 'Kick Ass 2', as Jim asked me to, I guess I kind of owe
Jim an apology. This was one violent ass movie, inferior
to the first on most levels, but not without its merits as
entertainment.
Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and his dulled nerve
endings have hung up the Kick Ass costume as the city is now
teeming with nutjobs in costumes patrolling the streets,
pretending to be superheroes. Problem is Dave is
bored.
Mindy Macready (Chloe-Grace Moretz) has also kind of stopped
being Hit Girl, tricking her guardian Marcus (Morris Chestnut)
into believing that she's actually going to high school when
he drops her off every morning, but instead she ditches class
and she trains and trains and trains some more, just like Big
Daddy wanted her to.
The last main holdover from the last film is Chris D'Amico
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who used to be the hero Red Mist
until Kick Ass blasted his dad out of a skyscraper with a
rocket launcher, and now he's now determined to prove a
villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days. Now
Chris is sporting fetish leather wear and has called himself a
very dirty name. Sure, we might've used that word before
in an article or two but we're trying to turn a new leaf over
here.
Simple enough. Dave is bored, wants to be badass like
Hit Girl, so he trains with her in the ways of legitimate
kickassery. Problem is Marcus really wants want Mindy to
at least give high school a try, which kind of works, Mindy
becoming down with the Mean Girls in the school, then it kind
of doesn't work which gives the audience a teaser of what we
might expect from young Ms. Moretz's role in the upcoming
'Carrie'. And do we really need another 'Carrie' movie?
With Hit Girl clocking out for the time
being, Dave needs to team up with somebody which leads him to
a crew of whackjobs led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Carrey)
and they do good work. Chris D'Amico also needs some
villains and they do even better work. For Evil!
In fact they cause Dave some great personal harm, which
invariably leads to a big showdown between good guys and bad
guys, featuring the triumphant return of Hit Girl, and a
warehouse chock full of dead people.
Director Jeff Wadlow was faced with a rather daunting task
when taking on the sequel for the first 'Kick Ass'.
Matthew Vaughn's film possessed elements that were
pathologically violent, funny, and subversive, among other
distasteful elements, and they had to be combined in a way to
make it not nearly as distasteful as all of it actually
was. For the most part, that worked in the first movie,
but even the original 'Kick Ass' at times couldn't resolve it
all. I don't care how you try to justify it, but Big
Daddy was a child abuser.
'Kick Ass 2' on the other hand completely fails at resolving
these subversive, distasteful issues. It's a fine line
to attempt to straddle rape and rampant murder and make it
watchable in a way that doesn't make the audience
uncomfortable, and that didn't happen this time around.
Admittedly, when a character gets raped or a loved one gets
murdered or a another hero gets gutted and decapitated, it's
going to be difficult in any circumstance to make light of
that, but this movie did try. I think that one of the
issues, amongst many, is that these events didn't have as much
of an effect on the characters in the film that they should
have, as they just moved on to the next action set piece as if
little had happened.
Now with all of that being said, I still enjoyed the movie on
a few levels. A lot of this enjoyment can easily be
pointed to the existence of Chloe Grace-Moretz who inhabits
the character of Hit Girl about as well as any movie actor has
inhabited their alter ego… ever. Maybe they should've
made her the next Batman. It couldn't have caused any
more grief and strife among Batman Fan than the guy they did
name. Any time Moretz is in the scene, 'Kick Ass 2' is a
joy to watch. Same goes for Jim Carrey, who for the
little time he is in this movie, is an awful lot of fun to
watch in this movie. This isn't to say that Aaron
Taylor-Johnson is a slouch as Kick Ass, just that he's pretty
much relegated to straight man status to Moretz's Hit
Girl. Also, the filmmakers might've wanted to whittle
down the dimensions of Johnson's neck, via CGI trickery, since
this is a dude who obviously works out a lot and as such I
didn't buy into the fact that the kid couldn't do a pull
up. And despite the misguided nature of an awful lot of
the plot elements of the story in this one, there is still a
healthy amount of cleverness embedded in this misguided
story. It clashes with itself in a number of instances,
the cleverness and the cluelessness, but it is still there to
be unearthed.
Despite some flaws, glaring ones, we can't and won't write off
'Kick Ass 2' as a complete loss because there was a lot of
good stuff in this movie. Jim Carrey… I see where you
were coming from my man, a place of honesty from the
heart. But dog, you still killed it in this movie.
Sorry.
