Kick-Ass 2 (2013) - Review

Superhero parodies/satires/deconstructions are relatively tough to do.  If you go too silly, you end up with something like Superhero Movie, and that’s never good.  Super is sublime – in fact, it’s one of my favorite movies ever.  But it’s certainly polarizing, no one can argue with that.  And there are others.  Defendor, Birdman, etc.  The point is, the superhero genre is a wildly popular one and it stands to reason that variants of it would be popular as well.  And variants have seemed to carve out a nice little niche as comically violent, somewhat disturbing character studies.

At least that’s what the first Kick-Ass is (as well as the vastly superior Super).  I didn’t mind the first Kick-Ass.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson was fine I guess, but the real draws were Nic Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz – they’re both a ton of fun all the time, and they stole the show there too.

Well since Cage isn’t in this one, they brought in Jim Carrey to play a similar over-the-top role, and the most notable thing about this movie is that Carrey suddenly decided to disown it due to its level of violence.  That’s odd.  This movie isn’t even as violent as the first one.  It actually feels strangely neutered in comparison, like they were intentionally cutting out parts to appeal to a wider audience.  Oh it’s still a pretty hard-R, but another big controversy is that they cut out the rape scene from the comics.  I have neither read the comics nor care to, so it doesn’t matter to me that they cut it, but it seems like the Kick-Ass 2 they wanted to make was perhaps a little too much for mainstream audiences.

I cannot abide this!  Far too violent!!

I also vaguely remember a projectile vomiting scene that might have been really funny if I was eight and this was a mid-90s comedy.  And the over-the-top violence, while sort of funny in the first one, has worn off by this point.  Combine that with some childishly crude code names for some of the heroes and villains and this just kind of feels like it was written by three teenage boys.

This film doesn’t address this violence or profanity in any sort of meaningful way; in fact, it seems more like they were just trying to skew younger.  This is in direct contrast to Super, which, while violent, had consequences and disturbing implications for the violence.  This is just gleeful violence for its own sake.

More importantly, it’s not entertaining.  This isn’t a long movie – it’s actually barely over an hour and a half – but it feels like an eternity, probably because Jim Carrey, the one saving grace (even Moretz seems bored), only has MAYBE ten minutes of screen time.  Hmm, the more I think about it... maybe Carrey had the right idea when divorcing this movie.