 |
| Copyright: Universal Pictures |
In the first few minutes, Kick-Ass 2 looks exactly like the
first movie in the franchise. We see the same characters doing the two same
things - being normal teenagers and fighting crime. Also, they are having the
same moral dilemmas about the nature of masked vigilantes, apparently totally unresolved
by the events of the first movie.
It seems almost as if Jeff Wadlow didn’t know what he was he
supposed to do for the first third of the film, so he kind of did what the
other guy did before him. Then, when the story starts to splinter, Kick-Ass 2
kind of finds its own (crooked) sea legs.
On one side, Dave Lizewski, who is also the costumed hero
Kick-Ass, wants to continue fighting the evil on the streets and wants to have
Hit-Girl by his side. The problem is that Hit-Girl, or Mindy Macready in her
everyday life, resists this notion because of their commitment to her new
guardian.
Instead of continuing to live a vigilante lifestyle, Mindy
decides to become a regular high school girl. Dave, having no other options,
must find new crime-fighting friends, while his archenemy Chris D'Amico,
formerly known as Red Mist, does the same thing with criminals and psychopaths.
In short, there is a lot of copying going on in this movie.
The villains copy the good guys, Wadlow copies Matthew Vaughn, the director of
Kick-Ass. In some segments, the plot is surreal and tries to parody some
aspects of modern society, especially the way people today use (and overuse)
social networks. Unfortunately, majority of these jokes are forcefully
delivered and lacks any insight whatsoever. It's almost like the writers heard
that Twitter is popular among the youngster, so they had to poke fun at it.
Cartoonishly extravagant violence always blends well with
poor writing and Kick-Ass 2 is no exception. There is a lot of blood-letting in
every action scene. Swords, nunchucks
and machetes don’t stop flying all over the place. This makes Kick-Ass 2
dynamic, but even violence seems somehow constrained and never reaches the
level of ultraviolence which can greatly improve films that know how to deal
with it, for example Kill Bill or Dredd.
Jeff Wadlow made Never Back Down in 2008. I didn’t like this
film, but it was at least a clearly labeled product designed for a teenager
audience. Here, Wadlow tried to pull of a completely different project with a
similar amount of effort, and it didn’t succeed. With a great cast (Chloë Grace
Moretz and Jim Carry stand out the most), it couldn’t fail completely, but in
the end all those actors just held the movie’s head above the water.
