I get – or is that hope? –Kick-Ass 2, the thematically ugly follow-up to a film that was
none-too-pretty to start with, is intended to skewer power-trip fantasies of
the superhero kind. An oft-repeated bit of phrasing in the narration and
dialogue wonders what would happen if a person in the real world decided to
suit up and dish out vigilante justice. Almost as often, a character will
growl, “this isn’t a comic book!” But this cornerstone of the premise was
thrown out well before the first film ended with Kick-Ass, a dweeby high school
student, riding a jet-pack to fire rounds from a bazooka into a penthouse
apartment where a mobster was beating up Hit Girl, a little girl trained by her
ex-cop father to take the law into her own hands. So, you see, Kick-Ass, for all its professed interest
in more grounded superheroics finds itself squarely in shoot-‘em-up,
blow-‘em-up territory with outlandish characters with wild backstories doing
exaggerated battle with each other. Its one bit of (almost) novelty is the nonstop
vulgar language and copious gory effects of combat. But, even more so the
second time around, that has the effect of making the whole thing revel in the
very implications it ostensibly brings up in order to critique the very genre
of which it’s ultimately a total embrace. It’s purposelessly toxic.
This movie finds Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Hit
Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) students by day and superheroes by night. It makes a
certain amount of sense that the aftermath of the first film finds the
mobster’s son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) looking to avenge his father’s death
by cooking up a new persona as a self-declared “world’s first supervillain.” It
makes less sense that the events of the first film have inspired a bunch of
copycat heroes who roam the streets looking to do good. They end up forming a
team with Kick-Ass and call themselves “Justice Forever.” I like the detail
that one of their outings as do-gooders is volunteering at a soup kitchen. The
group is lead by an ex-mob enforcer turned born-again Christian (Jim Carrey) and
includes a motley collection of teenagers (Clark Duke, Robert Emms), young professionals (Donald Faison, Lindy Booth), and a
middle-aged couple (Steven Mackintosh and Monica Dolan). Eventually, the supervillain gathers up an army of his own
and the whole thing starts to look suspiciously like ugly gang warfare in silly
costumes.
But it’s been ugly well before then. What’s worse? That the
film is offensive or that it feels like it has to try so hard to get there? This
is a film that’s mean-spirited and tonally off, expecting us to laugh and
cringe and cry at violence presented at more or less the same speed and style
all the way through. It’s full of quick and dirty stereotypes and unfeeling exaggeration
of conventional superhero tropes. The filmmakers seem to have missed the point
that’s not only implicit in their material, but is actually swirling around
unformed on screen as well. (To their credit, the source comic book by Mark
Millar missed the point, too.) Real life superheroes are just vigilantes in
costumes. Just because they think they’re the good guys, doesn’t make their
actions any less scary as individuals and destabilizing as a group. When
Justice Forever breaks up a poker game below what we’re told is a brothel of
captive illegal immigrants and cuts through a bunch of people, we’re only told
they are “bad.” It’s presented in the film as a lark, but isn’t it terrifying?
Wouldn’t an anonymous tip to the police be better for everyone involved?
Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass was far
from flawless, but at least it seemed aware of the scary and dangerous edge to
the premise.
Violence and vigilantism are not the only ugly aspects of Kick-Ass 2. That it has characters
explicitly call out racism and homophobia doesn’t make the film any less so for
such attitudes running rampant throughout. Especially distasteful is the
villain’s gang filled exclusively with lazy racial stereotypes. Twice he’s told
he’s being racist and he waves off criticism. But then the movie goes ahead and
has, say, a tough Russian henchwoman dressed up like Ivan Drago, as if the
villain’s racist hiring practices would be embraced by his hires. Besides,
every other “bad” person besides Christopher Mintz-Plasse is a broad stereotype,
from the Asians in the aforementioned brothel poker game to the Latino thugs
Kick-Ass fights near the beginning of the film to the black MMA fighter that
jumps at the chance to work for the bad guy. Maybe one or two of these would be
fine, but collectively it paints a picture of “non-white” or “foreign” equaling
“bad.” Those few self-conscious lines do nothing but point out that someone
involved thought the movie should say something to cushion the blow.
Misogyny doesn’t even get called out in this way. The movie
is too busy doing a good job hating every non-Hit Girl woman on screen young
and old alike. If they’re not actively hateful, they’re mocked and dismissed or
turned into an objectified pawn in the plot. Even Hit Girl’s tragic backstory
is plowed under for cheap thrills and lazy motivation. Instead of thinking
through the aftermath a childhood like hers would lead to, she’s dumped into a Mean Girls scenario between martial arts
battles. I felt disappointed for Lyndsy Fonseca, who, after playing a central
role the first time around, here is written off in a jealous overreacting
misunderstanding never to be seen again. But I felt only pity for young Claudia
Lee in her first film role. She plays a vicious queen bee of a high school
girl. Aside from her one-note slimy sniping and insinuating bullying of Hit
Girl, she’s dressed in ultra-tight clothing, gives a risqué dance at
cheerleader tryouts, then plays a scene in which she’s embarrassed in the
cafeteria when she projectile vomits and has explosive diarrhea at the same
time. We’re supposed to be happy watching this comeuppance, but I just felt sad
for everyone involved.
The actors aren’t to blame for any of this. They do their
best with bad writing. A waste of a good character can’t stop Moretz from
seeming like the star on the rise that she is. She’s a captivating screen
presence and sells some risible moments I wouldn’t have thought sellable. She’d
be more than capable of selling a female superhero movie, a sadly nonexistent
variant of the genre as far as Hollywood is concerned. Carrey’s fiercely
entertaining, but in an awfully small role. Mintz-Plasse goes for it, as
misguided as his character is. Taylor-Johnson plays the hero well; maybe we
could get him in a better franchise, stat. The supporting cast is filled with
fine work in roles either underwritten or set dressing, and certainly nothing
as unexpected and weirdly weighty as Nicolas Cage in the first movie. Technically,
he does appear here in a photograph on a wall, proving that he may be the only
actor who can get a big laugh out of me in a film he didn’t act in. (I was the
only one in the theater to laugh, though, so take it with a grain of salt. It
was a reversal of the crowd’s reactions the rest of the film.)
The ultimate failing of Kick-Ass
2 is the complete fumbling of tone that comes with writer-director Jeff
Wadlow’s approach, especially when it comes to violence. The first film had
Matthew Vaughn, who, though far from perfect on this matter, seemed to understand
how to shape it for the screen in ways that sometimes seemed aware of impact
and timing. Wadlow simply splatters the screen, fundamentally misunderstanding
the power of the images he plays with, unable to make violence matter or jokes
land. He underestimates how uncomfortable the film as a whole begins to feel.
It’s a film that’s callous and for all its talk of justice and surface-level
grappling with talk of responsibility and questioning the net societal gain of superheroes,
jocularly fascist and carelessly corrosive.
The movie is punishing and upsetting, all the more so for
treating its content so lightly. When one “bad” character kills a string of
policemen in creatively gory ways while two side characters crack jokes about
her killing prowess, that’s not entertaining. It’s deeply uncomfortable. When a
threat of rape is used as a tool of intimidation, even in a scene that tries to
make the villain the butt of the joke, that’s not simply an illustration of
evil; it’s awful and tonally mismanaged. No amount of straining for cheaply
offensive surface detail, juvenile jokes and cussing can paper over the movie’s
wholly bankrupt thematic and moral center.
