PLOT: The costumed high-school hero Kick-Ass joins with a group of normal citizens who have been inspired to fight crime in costume. Meanwhile, the Red Mist plots an act of revenge that will affect everyone Kick-Ass knows.
REVIEW: I was pretty excited for Kick-Ass 2. I was pretty sure that it would be pretty hard for me not to be entertained by a film that was seemingly just wild and crazy kids doing wild and crazy things to wild and crazy people. Unfortunately, this film lives up to none of my expectations and I'm not really sure who would be pleased with this movie. I expected shenanigans, and got very little except for maybe the first scene with Kick-Ass and Hit Girl re-enacting a classic scene from the first film. I expected a lot of Jim Carrey considering his sudden withdrawal of support from the film and his heavy presence in the ad campaigns, and it probably wasn't a bad move for Carrey. Kick-Ass 2 should have been Kick-Ass times 2 but it wasn't even close. I haven't been this disappointed about a film in quite a bit, especially one that deals with masked heroes. Having source material from Mark Millar should have helped the creative process here, and I have a feeling that the director and screenplay writer just didn't get what made the first one so great.
Jeff Wadlow has a very short resume including Cry_Wolf which I will admit to liking because it's a horror movie and I found it to be a pretty original entry into the slasher genre, but also Never Back Down which I can't say much for other than it's a guilty pleasure. Wadlow looks an awful lot like Vinny Chase from Entourage which has me wondering, maybe his career should have gone towards acting instead of directing because he's pretty unimpressive. I have a feeling that what he wanted to do with this movie was make a quality film, as opposed to an entertaining one. A lot of the story dealt with feelings, and high school drama which to me really has no place in this movie. The movie also didn't quite center around its titular character which really confused me, because it's actually called Kick-Ass 2. I haven't read the sequel comic so Wadlow may have been very faithful to the source material, but I just couldn't connect with the portrayal of these characters that to me had already been established in the first film.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson returns to the role of Kick-Ass and does a serviceable job playing the character again, and you can't really fault him for where the movie falls flat. Chloe Grace Moretz also returns as Hit Girl of course, as well as several others reprising their roles from the first film. Again I know it's not Moretz's fault that everything with Hit Girl falls flat for me, but I really am not interested in Mindy Macready that much. I don't care how she fits in on her first day in high school. I also don't care about her discovering herself as a young woman with her new friends at the school. I don't care about the Mean Girls-like environment she finds herself in, and is able to conquer it by channeling her inner Hit Girl to show them girls who's really the queen around the water fountain. All of this high school drama bullshit really wasn't needed, and all of the emoting that happens between Mindy and Dave is just unnecessary. I could have done without the entire cheerleading scene where she shows up her classmates at a dance team tryout. I mean really? This is Kick-Ass 2, not Mean Girls 2. Also, there were some references, whether it be unintentional or not, to Moretz's role in the upcoming remake of Carrie which I found just strange because it was so obviously a reference that it could not have been an accident.
Also returning is Christopher Mintz-Plasse, or McLovin, as the film's center villain who has now rebranded himself since his father's death. Now calling himself The Motherfucker, he has vowed to become the world's very first super villain and recruits a team of bad guys to help him. First of all, his team of bad guys is cartoonish in every way and unfortunately the only bad ass scene contains Mother Russia whom he recruits due to her criminal background and extraordinary strength. She takes out police officers like it's a Grand Theft Auto video game for about 5 minutes, and that's about as entertaining as the film ever got. The fact that this dude is running around telling serious people in the real world that he should now be known as The Motherfucker and people should fear him, is just plain dumb. If anyone should have been recasted it should have been this kid, because while he can be mildly funny on occasion, I just would have been much happier without the motherfucker. Notice the lack of capitalization. There are a new band of heroes including Dave's friend as well as the heavily advertised Colonel Stars and Stripes played by Jim Carrey. I was mostly excited for Carrey's role over anything else and I figured it would be my selling point for the film. Well if you want to know more, the last bits of my review are going to be chock full of spoilers so you should skip to the rating at this point if you don't want to know the details.
As I disguise the spoilers in meaningless introduction into a new paragraph, I find myself wondering if I should just do an entire review of spoilers because I could talk about the disappointment that was Kick-Ass 2 for a good amount of time. About a half hour into the movie, they kill the Colonel. Yeah, the guy that's had more screen time in any of the trailers than anyone else, dies a somewhat heroic death in the first half of the film. What's odd to me is that he is killed because he doesn't load his gun, because he doesn't believe the good guys should use them, and then is murdered in cold blood because he was absolutely defenseless. So not only does Carrey's withdrawal of support from the film really matter or make sense, as he's not much to the story, but why would you support this extended crappy cameo anyways. He's made out be the comedic relief, and his best line is in the trailer about his dog biting the guy's balls. Everything else said by him in the film is meant to be uplifting or of a leader of the group. He's not funny, whatsoever, and it's just a huge misfire in my opinion to have him in the role. Had I known this, I would have been extremely mad that they cast him because the Colonel wasn't the least bit funny.
Also, the big ruiner for me is that Dave and Mindy kiss at the end of the film. Yes, it seemed to be a genuine kiss between the two characters and the beginning of a romance that just seems all sorts of wrong. Mindy was a child in the first film and as far as I could tell, not in school. All of the sudden she is seeing her first boy band video, hanging out with cheerleaders at school, and now is kissing guys that are way too old for her and probably should have graduated years ago. The fact that Dave apparently didn't grow at all mentally or physically, but Mindy jumped an entire phase of childhood just baffles me. But whatever, this movie is done and over now and I'm not going to waste any more time on it. It was supposed to be one of the big hits of the summer for me because I like Kick-Ass so much, but it just fell flat on its face in an epic fail of misused characters and poor, boring writing. No one wanted a teen high school drama out of this film, they wanted the first film at an even higher bar. Unfortunately, it led us to this misdirected and woeful adaptation of a comic that I can almost guarantee without having read it, that it's much better than this movie. Don't go see Kick-Ass 2 in the theaters, I'm scared to see what the trilogy could end up looking like. This film definitely should have been called Ass-Kick, because I found myself actually missing Nic Cage, and I hate that guy. At least the motherfucker dies at the end, or does he?
ACTING : ( 6 / 10 )
STORY : ( 5 / 10 )
EXECUTION : ( 2 / 10 )
POSTER : ( 8 / 10 )
AWESOME : ( 3 / 10 )
FINAL RATING : ( 4 / 10 )
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