There's a scene in Kick-Ass 2 where one of Dave's only friends who hasn't quite got into the whole "real life superheroes" act yet finally joins them in an outfit that is basically an inversion of Dave's yellow-and-green jumpsuit and tries to choose his name. All he can come up with is variations like "Ass Kick!" and "The Asskicker" to which Dave and his other friend understandably roll their eyes. He later changes sides completely.
Remember that awful movie that the Daily Mail reviewed and accidentally called Kick-Ass? That's what Kick-Ass 2 is really a sequel to. It's so much a pale interpretation of what some terrible people thought the first movie was (and I'm afraid one of those people may be the series' creator, Mark Millar, who quite famously reads the Daily Mail) that it may as well be titled one of those awful unimaginative names Dave's friends comes up with.
I was actually fine with the awful clangers early on in this movie the Austin Powers-esque, "she sure had some big guns" followed by a shot of someone carrying some actual big guns towards the camera, the blatant descriptive gags like "his baton is so much bigger than Kick-Ass's baton means cock, by the way " the desperate attempts to be current with Mother F**ker spouting his plans to basically tear the world down and then saying, "I gotta tweet about this!"
I could deal with all this because I didn't expect much from this movie except for Hit Girl to be awesome. I really thought they couldn't mess that up because she's such an indestructible character. There's an early line where she tells her foster father, "I've done more in 15 years of my life than most adults have done in all of theirs," and it should ring hard for anyone over 30. Even part of the sequence I'm about to talk about gives a fine glimpse of what Chloe Moretz's Carrie might be like – in short, it might work, she shows the kind of vulnerability I didn't ever expect to see in such a face – a face that, if I described honestly, I'd probably be taken in by Yewtree
But it's in that middle sequence, the bulk of Moretz's strangely short screen time (she was the highlight of the first movie and even the negative reviews of this one single her out – I'm afraid I can't even be that generous), where this movie really lost me entirely. It begins as a strange Mean Girls knock-off with Mindy (Hit Girl) quite inexplicably going along with a plan to make her "like other girls", passing through a strange slumber party scene where she basically gets horny for the first time watching a "Union J" video (I was surprised to find this cheesy looking band, looking as fake as everything else in this movie, is actually real – and Chloe Moretz is a fan, forcing me to assume it's her doing ), and proceeding to a clichéd looking jock taking her on her first date (her foster father, so protective, seems to be fine with this) that for a horrible second I thought was going to lead into some kind of rape (I forget if the other "rape" scene happens before or after this – I'm not even gonna talk about that 'cos it's been mentioned plenty elsewhere). Instead she is met by her fellow school pals and then deserted. HURTFUL! This whole middle act story ends with Mindy strolling into school dressed like all the other shallow girls and prodding them with an invention of Big Daddy from the first movie – a stick that makes them throw up and diarrhoea at the same time, which looks more like vanilla and chocolate pudding coming out of both ends. It was at this point that if you'd photographed me you'd have seen a face that looked a little like when Eric Cartman's funny bone broke in "South Park".
It's not that I'm offended by this stuff. If you know me, you know this. And I knew that under any other circumstance I would've found it tear-inducingly funny. There was just something about the way it was done, and the context, that kind of paralysed me. It was just so pointless.
Jim Carrey disowned this movie because of the violence after Sandy Hook etc. He'd've done better just saying he was embarrassed at how it turned out. I heard there was a post-credits scene at the end of Kick-Ass 2, but I left as soon as the screen went black and I wished for once I was the kind of person who leaves earlier sometimes. Frankly unless that post-credits scene was Ashton Kutcher saying "you've been punk'd!", I think at least I saved some of my time the day I saw this. It's not offensive, it's just embarrassing. The only good thing is that it'll make you realise just how classy the first movie was. Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, you are sorely missed
Remember that awful movie that the Daily Mail reviewed and accidentally called Kick-Ass? That's what Kick-Ass 2 is really a sequel to. It's so much a pale interpretation of what some terrible people thought the first movie was (and I'm afraid one of those people may be the series' creator, Mark Millar, who quite famously reads the Daily Mail) that it may as well be titled one of those awful unimaginative names Dave's friends comes up with.
I was actually fine with the awful clangers early on in this movie the Austin Powers-esque, "she sure had some big guns" followed by a shot of someone carrying some actual big guns towards the camera, the blatant descriptive gags like "his baton is so much bigger than Kick-Ass's baton means cock, by the way " the desperate attempts to be current with Mother F**ker spouting his plans to basically tear the world down and then saying, "I gotta tweet about this!"
I could deal with all this because I didn't expect much from this movie except for Hit Girl to be awesome. I really thought they couldn't mess that up because she's such an indestructible character. There's an early line where she tells her foster father, "I've done more in 15 years of my life than most adults have done in all of theirs," and it should ring hard for anyone over 30. Even part of the sequence I'm about to talk about gives a fine glimpse of what Chloe Moretz's Carrie might be like – in short, it might work, she shows the kind of vulnerability I didn't ever expect to see in such a face – a face that, if I described honestly, I'd probably be taken in by Yewtree
But it's in that middle sequence, the bulk of Moretz's strangely short screen time (she was the highlight of the first movie and even the negative reviews of this one single her out – I'm afraid I can't even be that generous), where this movie really lost me entirely. It begins as a strange Mean Girls knock-off with Mindy (Hit Girl) quite inexplicably going along with a plan to make her "like other girls", passing through a strange slumber party scene where she basically gets horny for the first time watching a "Union J" video (I was surprised to find this cheesy looking band, looking as fake as everything else in this movie, is actually real – and Chloe Moretz is a fan, forcing me to assume it's her doing ), and proceeding to a clichéd looking jock taking her on her first date (her foster father, so protective, seems to be fine with this) that for a horrible second I thought was going to lead into some kind of rape (I forget if the other "rape" scene happens before or after this – I'm not even gonna talk about that 'cos it's been mentioned plenty elsewhere). Instead she is met by her fellow school pals and then deserted. HURTFUL! This whole middle act story ends with Mindy strolling into school dressed like all the other shallow girls and prodding them with an invention of Big Daddy from the first movie – a stick that makes them throw up and diarrhoea at the same time, which looks more like vanilla and chocolate pudding coming out of both ends. It was at this point that if you'd photographed me you'd have seen a face that looked a little like when Eric Cartman's funny bone broke in "South Park".
It's not that I'm offended by this stuff. If you know me, you know this. And I knew that under any other circumstance I would've found it tear-inducingly funny. There was just something about the way it was done, and the context, that kind of paralysed me. It was just so pointless.
Jim Carrey disowned this movie because of the violence after Sandy Hook etc. He'd've done better just saying he was embarrassed at how it turned out. I heard there was a post-credits scene at the end of Kick-Ass 2, but I left as soon as the screen went black and I wished for once I was the kind of person who leaves earlier sometimes. Frankly unless that post-credits scene was Ashton Kutcher saying "you've been punk'd!", I think at least I saved some of my time the day I saw this. It's not offensive, it's just embarrassing. The only good thing is that it'll make you realise just how classy the first movie was. Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, you are sorely missed