Kick-Ass II

The 2010 superhero comedy satire, Kick-Ass, was considered a controversial film by critics, yet a cult classic by casuals, with the story based on the 2008 Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. graphic novel providing an experience that seemed to please viewers, earned its money back at the box office, and gained strong enough ratings and hype to warrant a sequel three years later. With a new director at the helm (with Matthew Vaughn now only acting as a producer), this 2013 sequel, simply titled Kick-Ass II, did noticeably less than its predecessor, only managing to barely break even and did far worse critically, meaning that despite the niche popularity of the brand, something was amiss in this follow-up.

Four years after the events of the first film, Kick-Ass, otherwise known as Dave Lizewski (played again by Aaron-Taylor Johnson) has grown bored of his normal life after retiring as a superhero, and decides to get back into the action and work alongside fellow superhero, Mindy Macready/Hit-Girl (played again by Chloe-Grace Moretz), who herself is trying to live like a typical teenage girl, but can’t seem to escape the vigilante life her father trained her to live in. Once the two start to train together, Dave eventually finds out about a superhero team being formed by other civilians who took to crime fighter after being inspired by Kick-Ass. This team, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (played by Jim Carrey), tries to whittle out crime on the streets, but things get a little more dangerous when Chris D’Amico (played again by Christopher Mintz-Plasse) returns and swears revenge on Kick-Ass for murdering his father, adopting the new supervillain name of ‘’The Motherf**ker, and starts to create his own super villain team. With Mindy trying to avoid becoming a vigilante again, but with Dave’s family getting caught in the crossfire, the two find that they can’t escape the superhero life forever and re-don their costumes in order to take this old threat down once and for all.

Kick-Ass II contains the same level of annoyance, vulgarity, and unlikeable characters as the first film, but without any of the strong purpose, direction, or solid understanding of its concept, resulting in a very messy experience that features very little enjoyment.

Taking inspiration from Books 2 and 3 of the Kick-Ass graphic novel series, even though the idea of cramming two storylines into one film should result in an overcrowded narrative, the sad truth is that both stories essentially tell a different perspective of the same plot: one being from Dave’s perspective and the other being from Mindy’s. The film decided to combine both arcs into one while trimming down surrounding elements in order to avoid padding (which annoyingly just so happened to be a good chunk of Hit-Girl’s storyline) and the result was a plot that mixed the assimilation into high school and normal teen livelihood with super villain dramatics and eventual climatic showdown. As expected, this makes the movie feel pretty messy in terms of pacing and narrative, as neither storyline feels properly established, set-up or even effectively concluded, rather going through the motions of every cliched superhero scenario on both the civilian and the vigilante front and nothing surprising or interesting ever comes from it. That brings into question a surprise problem with this sequel, that being the lack of unique flair, identity, and satirical touch.

The first film, despite many loving it, wasn’t as clever as it made itself out to be, with its only idea of superhero satire being exposing a more vulgar side of the genre that wasn’t commonly seen in the mainstream media. It made the film not very engaging, annoying with its humor and characters, and pretty stale and one-note in regard to its commentary, but at least to its credit, it knew what it was and set out to achieve said goal, whereas this film feels like it’s bouncing back and forth between exploiting comic-book violence and showing how cool it is to be a superhero, while at the saying time demonizing violence and saying it’s bad to be a superhero. It’s a very messy film that juggles plot ideas and comic book tropes without bringing a new spin on the genre, leaving it feeling very hollow and without style. The writer and director for this film, Jeff Wadlow, has a track record of producing not the best material, with movies like Cry Wolf, Prey, Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island all being poorly reviewed despite being box office successes. He doesn’t appear to be the person to helm a movie of this type, and he doesn’t bring anything dramatically impressive to warrant changing up directors, so his involvement definitely didn’t help things.

The characters have always struggled with the source material’s tone and style of delivery, as it’s obvious that it wants to adopt this atmosphere and vibe that’s very akin to an R-rated teen comedy along the lines of Superbad or American Pie, which has a very specific way of writing characters, dialogue and humor. In many ways, superhero films have not taken this kind of unfiltered teen perspective, so one from that vantage point deserves to be attempted (which is what the first film and comic did), but the problem is that it makes a lot of the characters really unlikeable. They either fall into these one-note tropes of the genre that say nothing but dumb crass lines, or lame superhero archetypes that have a foul perverted mouth. The first film suffered this bad, with Hit-Girl being the only character of substance and containing any likeable traits, but despite leveling her up to a main character in the sequel, they still fail to take full advantage of her. Most of her scenes involved her being stuck trying to be a regular teen girl and going through the traditional hurdles that come with that storyline (dealing with mean girls, being tricked by a boy, etc), so it not only removes an element that made her unique and cool in the first place (seeing a girl that age being a vigilante is pretty jarring), but even this angle isn’t handle in a creative way (which is ironic as the graphic novel at least handles it a touch better). She does still have some fun action moments and clearly should’ve been the main lead for this movie, but her relevance in the story doesn’t feel that important especially next to her co-lead.

Aaron-Taylor Johnson’s role has never been likeable, interesting, or enjoyable to watch, being your typical nerdy dweeb high-schooler except without the qualities that at least made others like him endearing. His role is so one-note, he’s ironically less distinct after removing the overly graphic and perverted qualities he previously had, and while he isn’t nearly as pathetic and whiny anymore, he’s kind of just boring now and someone who takes time away from the other, more interesting characters. His acting isn’t that bad (especially during the climax) but he’s just not an engaging lead. The villain is equally as pathetic and annoying with no entertaining or imitation factor, so he’s just a loser that poses no threat, and while his sidekicks have cool outfits, they don’t contribute much to the story (although Olga Kurkulina as Mother Russia does provide a pretty intimidating presence). The movie is surprisingly stacked with cameos from people that either were or would become big names later; Jim Carrey, Donald Faison, John Leguizamo, Iain Glen, Daniel Kaluuya, Benedict Wong, Tom Wu, and Ella Purnell, all of whom aren’t used to their best abilities and feel completed wasted.

The first film’s action started off as clumsy, street-level brawling, before back-peddling on its ‘’realistic’’ approach for a more traditional comic book climax, and while messily handled, it was still delivered in a relatively adequate way outside of a few choice cinematography and editing issues. This film’s action is more basic in delivery and is filmed a bit better, but there are no moments that are very memorable outside of a fun highway chase with Hit Girl fighting on top of a van. The stunts are generic, the shots by cinematographer Tim Maurice Jones are bettered constructed and edited, but aren’t very interesting to look at, and because the stakes are solely based around a past film rather than any consequences built within this one, very little feels at risk and the results feel empty. Even the unique color palette the universe had is gone, with a lot of the color choices and costuming being replaced with more by-the-numbers outfits and more muted tones of color, despite getting the same costume designer (Sammy Sheldon) and the same art director (Joe Howard) from the last movie (although the other art director, Aleksandra Marinkovich, may have had a hand in the less-than-popping visual design, due to his past work on movies like The Incredible Hulk, the 2012 film version of Total Recall and The Suicide Squad).

It feels like this movie was trying to dial back the aggressively mean-spirited and uncomfortably brutal graphic nature of the original source through minimal action, less swearing, very few sexual innuendos, and little to no overtly violent material that was still quite prevalent in the comic (during a major conflict, a hundred children get slaughtered and a teen girl gets raped whereas in the film, it’s just a few cops who get killed). In hindsight, this isn’t too much of an issue as the film never used its crass nature effectively and only felt like it was shocking for the sake of being shocking, but it is a bit of a jarring turnaround. Ironically Jim Carrey would later refuse to promote the movie on account of the film’s violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and while the movie is still gory and aggressive, it’s nowhere near the same level that the previous film was, so it’s a little strange to bring that up again even if the intent was respectable.

Kick-Ass isn’t a brand that’s really going to click with a lot of people, and it’s kind of impressive the first film did as well as it did when its ”brilliant” commentary was exploring deep themes like ”being a superhero means getting beat up a lot”, but it at least knew what it was. This sequel doesn’t feel like it knows what it wants to be and still carries the same flaws and annoyances of the last film without anything new or inventive keeping it out of range of its obvious missteps. It does at least know about its simplistic nature and that Kick-Ass isn’t very deep or dramatic, so in that regard, it’s easier to sit through, but it also has shabby direction, an aimless story, mostly underdeveloped/annoying characters, underwhelming action, and humor that while not mind-numbing, is still not entertaining and on occasion still dips into the crude and pathetic (apparently teen girls projectile vomiting while having explosive diarrhea is hilarious). If you like the first film, it doesn’t feel like there’s enough missing for you to not be into this one, but for a comic-book story that is trying to be more realistic (these films have their bad guys being defeated by jet-pack propelled bazookas and a shark in a tank, that doesn’t really scream ‘’down-to-earth”), it feels best for this franchise to hang up the mantle for good.