Kick-Ass 2 Review
By Casey Douglass
Image ©Universal Pictures
If you have no memory of
watching a film featuring a weedy guy in a green and yellow wetsuit,
or a young girl dressed in purple with a severe case of potty mouth,
go and watch Kick-Ass right now! I’ll wait. If these characters
conjure up mental images of jet-pack mounted mini-guns and mugs of
hot chocolate stuffed with marshmallows, welcome to the sequel. While
it’s not absolutely necessary to have seen the first film before
viewing the second, you will get the most from it if you have.
The film begins at the
tattered ends of the first one, with Mindy Macready / Hit-girl (Chloë
Grace Moretz) adjusting to a life without her dead father (Nicolas
Cage’s Big Daddy). A friend of his has taken her in, and is trying
to push her into a more normal, less violent life. Mindy takes to it
like a boxer to needlework. It feels strange and scary and she would
much rather be out ridding the streets of criminal scum.
Her partner in heroism
Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has also given up the mask,
partly due to feeling like some kind of false superhero that, while
inspiring to others, was nothing compared to Big Daddy and Hit-Girl.
Dave decides to engage Mindy as his tutor and trainer, wanting to
finally become the real deal.
It is not long into the
film where a botched training session draws a lot of unwanted
attention to “masked-vigilantes” and the two part company to
pursue their own attempts at the lives they want to lead. For Mindy,
this is being forced ever deeper into High-school culture, concerns
of having to fit in and to be popular, all the while having the
feeling that she is selling her soul for the price of a promise to
her dead daddy. She pushes her Hit-Girl persona so far back into the
closet that Aslan might soon be seen sporting a purple wig and
swearing at Mr. Tumnus. Dave faces similar issues as he follows the
opposite path and embraces his superhero alter-ego even more, having
to fit into a new group of like-minded individuals and seeing if he
can survive without Hit-Girl’s aid.
But what would a sequel
be without the return of the evil mastermind in waiting Chris D'Amico
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Having seen Kick-Ass propel and explode
his father with an RPG from the top floor of a skyscraper, the boy
certainly has vengeance issues. After the fortuitous death of his
kill-joy mother, he reinvents himself as The Motherf**ker and sets
about building his own evil empire to choke the city and to sever the
veins of his father’s killers.
This ladies and gents,
is the film. The story arcs of each character collide and then veer
away at intervals, forming a deadly dance of dressing up in funny
clothes and crude name calling, with the occasional brutal fight or
one-upmanship in between. I think that it trundles along at a nice
pace, the action never outstaying its welcome, nor the quieter scenes
dragging on indefinitely. The humour that ran through the first film
is still as pure in the second. If anything, the swearing is even
more inventive and some of the one liners even more memorable.
The real strength of
the second film is the ensemble of other characters that flesh out
both sides of the conflict. Kick-Ass teams up with Colonel Stars and
Stripes (Jim Carrey) and his crew of heroes, which also include Dr.
Gravity (Donald Faison) and Night Bitch (Lindy Booth). The villainous
ranks are also swelled, most notably by Mother Russia (Olga
Kurkulina), a giantess of a woman who’s epic stand-off with four or
five police cars using nothing more than what is at hand is well
worth the price of admission on its own.
The technical side of
the film is very well done, with the variety of costumes and colours
on screen a nice reminder of the comic book origins of the series.
Every scene is clear and precise, and the accompanying score carries
it all along nicely to its grandstanding conclusion.
While I did enjoy the
film very much, it does suffer from the usual malady of simply being
a sequel. While it does change the formula here and there, it did
feel like a case of having “seen it all before”, even if it has
been expanded and polished to within an inch of its life. I think
that may be the reason the fighting was more brutal and the swearing
more deviously placed; to cover the notion that it is all a bit
samey. It is definitely still well worth watching, and if you loved
the first, I am almost certain you will love this sequel.
Rating : 4.5/5
