By Nicholas Ware
For comic fans, there was a lot to like about the first Kick-Ass movie, released three years ago. It had a fun level of self-awareness, skewering the stupidity of the fans of comic books trying to become heroes themselves. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) dresses up as Kick-Ass and ... gets his ass kicked. It's a one-note but enjoyable joke. Meanwhile, a genuinely psychotic father-daughter team does the real work of vigilante crime-fighting. The daughter, Chloë Grace Moretz's breakthrough Hit-Girl, is back for the sequel, as is the titular hero. But whereass Kick-Ass was the joke of Kick-Ass, he's the center of Kick-Ass 2. The problem is that the character is so milquetoast, so drawn from the haziest of stock hero characters, that even as he goes through the standard superhero's dilemma (to give up the mask or persevere for his ideals), the audience is left waiting, fruitlessly, for a reason to care. Meanwhile, the film's bro-tastic meta-commentary on itself self-implodes as the film finds its own existence far more clever than a cultured and attentive audience ought. The result is a movie whose major crime is not a lack of quality but a lack of conviction. Kick-Ass 2 is too busy eating its own tail and laughing at its own jokes to have something worth sharing.
The plot of Kick-Ass 2 isn't a problem. It's actually quite easy to follow, well-paced, and the characters' motivations make plenty of sense. That is more than I can say for two of the other three summer comic book movies, Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel. The problem is that the two protagonists are both sketches, not fully formed characters. They are plays on the expectations of a comic book audience. The generic nature of their names is emblematic of the depth of their interior lives. Kick-Ass gets his ass kicked. Hilarious. Hit-Girl is a girl who hits adults. So funny. But Dave Lizewski and Mindy Macready? These are not characters whose lives mean much. Their struggles to balance their hero personas with their "real lives" is really just an imposition on the audience, an excuse to make the film feature-length. It wears, as does the bro humor, over-the-top violence, and cursing. These choices are not poor in and of themselves, but the repetitive nature of their use in Kick-Ass 2 renders them just as flat as the film's characters.
Further complicating the enjoyment of Kick-Ass 2 is the film's desire to be a comment on the hyper-violent, sexist nature of male adolescent hero fantasy while itself failing to ever be anything more than that which it supposedly skewers. At least the movie version had the decency to show some restraint that the comic's original author--the increasingly criticized Mark Millar--didn't. In the comic, Chris's menacing of Kick-Ass is punctuated with the rape of Kick-Ass's girlfriend. The film wisely changes it into a sexual impotence joke when Chris' rape threat never gets past the threat phase, as he cannot seem to rise to the occasion. While I applaud the film for choosing to go the route of making the attempted rapist look the fool--the only way to do a rape joke is when rape is not the punchline--Chris's limpness is indicative of the limpness of Kick-Ass 2 as well. Kick-Ass 2 is ho-hum.
Kick-Ass 2 opens today at most major multiplexes. Rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and brief nudity. Run time 1 hour 43 minutes.
