The latest Kick-Ass movie is out, Kick-Ass 2, and it was not impressive at all. I’m not going to go beat around the bush, this movie should be called “Lame Ass” because the movie’s lame. The new writer/director Jeff Wadlow did not understand the source material. The lighting, the framing,and the soundtrack all felt out-of-place. I tried to get into this movie, and couldn’t. I had more fun reading the novels than watching this film. I wanted to leave, go outside the theater, and dress up as Kick-Ass and re-enact the graphic novel for people who were interested in seeing Kick-Ass 2, a movie that should have been about the original source material and examining the difference between comic book escapism, real-life heroes, and its consequences in the real world. Kick-Ass 2 is virtually empty of all those concepts and consequences where Matthew Vaughn’s 2010 original in stark contrast transplanted a superhero origin story into a marginally realistic world and was a bold new step for super hero movies. Jeff Wadlow’s follow-up does the opposite. I felt like I was watching re-runs of a 66’ Batman TV series. He tried to be witty but it came across as if he had no idea what he was trying to do. There was no real character development and the whole relationship with Hit-Girl and her step-dad felt awkward. You get a few moments of Hit Girl that are fun and cute for the most part, but not a break out performance like we get from the original Kick-Ass.
Here’s how Universal Pictures describes the plot.
"After Kick-Ass’ insane bravery inspires a new wave of self-made masked crusaders, led by the badass Colonel Stars and Stripes, our hero joins them on patrol. When these amateur superheroes are hunted down by Red Mist — reborn as The Mother F%&*^r — only the blade-wielding Hit Girl can prevent their annihilation. When we last saw junior assassin Hit Girl and young vigilante Kick-Ass, they were trying to live as normal teenagers Mindy and Dave. With graduation looming and uncertain what to do, Dave decides to start the world’s first superhero team with Mindy. Unfortunately, when Mindy is busted for sneaking out as Hit Girl, she’s forced to retire-leaving her to navigate the terrifying world of high-school mean girls on her own. With no one left to turn to, Dave joins forces with Justice Forever, run by a born-again ex-mobster named Colonel Stars and Stripes. Just as they start to make a real difference on the streets, the world’s first super villain, The Mother F%&*^r, assembles his own evil league and puts a plan in motion to make Kick-Ass and Hit Girl pay for what they did to his dad. But there’s only one problem with his scheme: If you mess with one member of Justice Forever, you mess with them all."
I really cannot recommend this film. I don’t think Jeff Wadlow read the graphic novels at all. It seems that he looked at pictures and pretty colors then he probably thought that the books were beneath him and had his dog, cat, or whatever type of animal these Hollywood types deem cool or fashionable write the screenplay to Kick-Ass 2. He takes pajama-clad wannabes and catapults them into a universe where merciless beatings produce minimal bruises and devastating losses and tries to form mythic origin stories from them. In overestimating the appeal of its central characters and under developing the emotional substance of its secondary ones, Kick-Ass 2 feels fatally miscalculated – a would-be genre deconstruction that explains way too much without understanding at all what it wants to say. I think that Wadlow was so geeked-out that he got to sit with the cool nerds and he forgot what he was hired to do.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Savages) once again plays Dave, the high schooler who introduced the world to real-life superheroes through Kick-Ass. Although he’s retired from his days as a masked vigilante, Dave repeatedly tries to convince former comrade Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) to team up with him to fight crime. After she turns him down to contend with her “mean girl” classmates, Dave joins a small group of like-minded do-gooders, Justice Forever, which includes Jim Carrey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes, Night Bitch (Lindy Booth), Dr. Gravity (Scrubs’ Donald Faison) and his buddy Marty, now dubbed Battle Guy (Clark Duke of The Office). Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) blames Kick-Ass for the death of his father, and the former Red Mist recasts himself as the world’s first super-villain, The Mother[frick]er, and recruits a rogue’s gallery of “heavy hitters” to help him exact murderous revenge.
This is not a story that truly explores a meaningful human condition, not a single tear is shed for the death of one of the only true depictions of heroism, the death of Kick-Ass’ dad. Everyone’s whining why they don’t want to act like superheroes because things got hard. I kept thinking to myself, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” I guess JFK was not talking to the heroes in all of us because we want things handed to us, the easy way, and say wow look at how hard we worked and now we made it. I hate this movie, you can go see it if you want and waste 103 minutes of your time. Precious hours that you won’t be getting back, hours that you can be doing something productive. I read somewhere that director Jeff Wadlow is going to do X-Force. I can’t wait to see what a cluster [frick] that’s going to be because I don’t think he has the talent to pull off a good X-Force film.
Your Beloved Raphy