I was slightly worried about how I would feel about this film, the first one was such a big success and it pushed boundaries with violence and shocked us with Hit Girl’s language. In this one Chloe Grace Moretz is a little older so we are more accepting of the language and it seems that the violence of the first one wasn’t enough for the second one so they had to take it up a notch which might be too much for some people. Kick-Ass 2 sees Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) taking his crime fighting to the next level and joins a band of misfit superheroes headed by Jim Carrey’s Captain Stars and Stripes meanwhile Hit Girl is trying to fit in with her cliqued high school friends but as always it never goes as planned. After the events of the first film, Christopher Mintz Plasse has transformed himself into the world’s greatest super villain with a name that I can’t reasonably write down and has vowed to get revenge for his father’s death.
It is unusual that Jim Carrey has refused to publicise his own participation in the film, it didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence that the stars have turned their backs on it. To be fair, Carrey isn’t in the film for the second half but he did seem to enjoy beating the hell out of a group of Chinese pimps. Taylor-Johnson and Moretz work well together although they seem to be missing the spark that was in the first film, its like they are just going through the motions. The supporting cast seem much more enthusiastic, especially Mintz-Plasse’s band of crooks, Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina) is terrifying with her seemingly unbeatable physique and the fact that they had to let her out of prison because one day she decided to eat her cell mate. Look out for Turk from Scrubs as Dr. Gravity and Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen as Uncle Ralph D’Amico.
The story consists of the usual revenge attempt and there is very much a sense of ‘an eye for an eye’ with what unfolds. It was refreshing to see Hit Girl/ Mindy try to be a normal teenage girl, the downside is that she was convinced into it by a Union J video. The makers lose all respect for even including a song like that. It was good to see how Mindy dealt with the ritual humiliation that is dished out and expected from a high school queen bee. It is good that they tried to go a different direction but it shows how lost at sea they were with Kick-Ass’ story. The constant repetition of ‘this is not a comic book, its real life’ grated after a while, its as if they tried to get serious with it but it just didn’t work. In a film like this, it is expected to be overly violent and slightly unrealistic, trying to make it real makes it too violent and takes us out of the story.
The first film is greatly superior and anyone who is expecting anything like it, will be great disappointed. Its not bad on its own but I believe it will be forgotten pretty and dragged up again when they inevitably make the third one.
