Review: Kick Ass 2

Kick Ass and Hit Girl are back, kicking ass and hitting girls.  Jim Carrey helps them for a bit.  The Red Mist has now changed his name to the Motherfucker.  Let the games begin!......oh.

Oh God. Oh dear sweet Jesus. I wanted to be professional about this. I wanted to have some kind of constructive introduction to this review, creating a sense of context for the film in question, talk about reactions to the first film, expectations for part 2 and all other necessary guff. Finally, once all the hype was established and put to one side, and I'd finished trying to build up tension like a birthday magician prepping the crowd for the grand finale, I'd reveal what I thought, drawing the inevitable rabbit of opinion from my hat with a 'ta-da!' and a star rating and a 'see this if you liked...' section to top it all off. I wanted to do all that, but I can't. The rabbit is dead.

What I'm trying to say is, Kick Ass 2 is bad. Like, seriously, your-money-would-be-better-spent-on-bubble-gum-and-fart-pillows bad. It's worse than the quality drop from Mean Girls to Mean Girls 2. From Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. From In Rainbows to King Of Limbs as-covered-by Spandau Ballet. From The Simpsons to live-action Simpsons pornography. From Belgian lager to Sainsbury's Basics lemonade left out in the sun outside a B&Q in Slough, with fag butts floating in the backwash. If you see it, you might actually die. From the badness. It will melt your soul in half. Don't do it. Think of the children. They are our future.

Why do you hate us???

So, what's the problem? Perhaps the only way to begin to address the ridiculous number of ways in which this film screws up is by comparison to Kick Ass One. One had lots of great things, such as a watertight and witty script, good casting, superbly choreographed fight scenes and a fantastic score. 

Most of all, though, its impact came from being a rare example of a film that is shocking and subversive, but not exploitative, and this is mostly down to the child-assassin, Hit Girl. In her breakout role, Chloe Glowee Mowee gave us an eleven year old girl who fights like Bruce Lee, murders criminals by the dozen like she's picking ticks off a dog and swears like Tarantino arguing in a youtube comments thread.

This was an incredibly daring and fresh approach; in standard superhero plots, children are only there to be saved from burning buildings, and to believe in Hero-man when all the town has turned against him in that part just before Act III when he doesn't think he can do it any more, until little Fucky reminds him that he's great and that he should believe in himself. With Hit Girl, however, Kick Ass totally messed with our understanding of that. By playing with film taboos around childhood innocence, we were kept in constant suspense. Here, children aren't being rescued from the burning building; they're burning the fucking thing down themselves, and capping all the survivors in the name of justice. Thus, in the climatic showdown between the kids and the Big Bad Guy, we no longer had the security of formula to assure us that the Good Guy will survive, and that the children won't get hurt. Anything could happen, and God damn, it happened with style.

Pictured: Style, in a nutshell.

Kick Ass danced majestically on the cliffs of good taste that overlook the dark valley of dead-rabbit awful, but never put a foot wrong. Kick Ass 2 is testament to the difficulty of getting that balance right, by showing us how bad it could have really been. To start with, there's an issue with the basic plot: Kick Ass had 'boy and girl want to be superheroes in real-life', which was not completely original¹ but had at least enough twists to keep it fresh, and served as a solid concrete foundation on which to build up the various other ass-kicking elements. In Kick Ass 2, we have “boy and girl are now superheroes; they go fight some bad guys. And the girl is having a hard time in school”. It's gone from being a twist on a standard formula to an awkward blend of two very boring genre movies.

Hey, remember this movie? It was pretty good, you should watch this instead.

On top of this, there's the casual racism. The arch-nemesis, Christopher Mistopher Plistopher's The Mother Fucker, assembles a team of villains with half-assed bad guy names built around racial stereotypes: the black guy is “Black Death”, the Asian guy is “Ghengis Carnage”, and of course we also have a thick-accented and inhumanly brutal Russian, 'Mother Russia', complete with hammer and sickle motif on her skimpy warrior bikini. This isn't as bad as, say, “Meesa Jar Jar Binks”, but it is completely unnecessary. Indeed, when the Mother Fucker first reveals these names, his right-hand man calls him out for being racially insensitive. Of course, he is completely ignored, in the name of alleged irony. Its all part of the mistaken modern trend in believing that racist jokes are o.k as long as you know they're racist.

Not-racism: an artist's interpretation.

This issue underlies the main problem with this film: it's a by-the-numbers action movie, with a by-the-numbers teen movie wedged in the middle like swiss cheese in a tub of Neapolitan, that tries to excuse its overwhelming lack of originality by occasionally winking at the camera and going 'superhero movies, amirite?'

It's not even worth going into the horribly misjudged scene in which an attempted rape is played for laughs, because the attacker can't get erect and ultimately bails. That fact stands well enough alone as one of many errors in judgement on the part of the film-makers.

At its core, Kick Ass was about taking a standard fantasy story, that of the costumed vigilante, and applying it to the real-world, where fights actually hurt, a lot, and crime has an annoying tendency to pay quite well. In the sequel, this idea is turned around: at the beginning, we are constantly being reminded by the characters that 'this is real life', but the film soon forgets this criterion as it devolves into bad fantasy. As such, the violence has no impact, the quips seem clunky and overwritten, and for heaven's sake there's an attempted rape that is played for laughs.

Another movie that's much more worth your time.

Overall, it's that rare breed of sequel that, in hindsight, actually manages to make the first one seem worse. Trying to go back and enjoy Kick Ass now is like trying to tuck into a delicious steak dinner when you've just taken a school trip to an abattoir.  I want to end this review with a nice pithy statement about my overall viewing experience, and a mark out of five. Alas, all I have is a dead rabbit and a hat full of turd-pellets. Just please, someone, think of the children. They need you. Goodnight, and God bless.

Edit: Having said all that, it turns out that there was something good to come out of this film. There's a pirated version currently doing the rounds, in which you can overhear the bloke who's recording it ask his talky neighbours to pipe down so he can resume his law-breaking in peace. Observe: 

1By this point, every modern superhero movie owes so much debt to the influence of Watchmen that you can't really call them rip-offs with a straight face. It would be like saying that every sandbox video game is a rip off of Grand Theft Auto, that every film with flashbacks is stealing from Citizen Kane, that cake is a rip-off of eggs and flour.