Could Chloë Grace Moretz’s Hit Girl survive another duff Kick-Ass sequel?
Let’s not forget the impact Matthew Vaughn’s original Kick-Ass movie made in 2010. Based on the comic book of the same name by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr, this was Watchmen’s punky little kid brother, a spiky, primarycoloured black comedy about reallife superheroes for the social media age. Its undoubted star was 12-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz as foul-mouthed, deadly preteen Hit Girl, a role you knew she’d absolutely nailed when the Daily Mail called her “one of the most disturbing icons and damaging rolemodels in the history of cinema”. Aaron Taylor-Johnson seemed perfectly cast (if a little overly buff) as the nerdy title character, who finds himself biting off way more than he can chew when he decides to become a real-life costumed vigilante on the streets of suburban Staten Island.
Kick-Ass proved an outlandish success because its creative team, Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman, had the freedom to adapt Millar’s graphic novel with the biggest of geeky, fanboy-friendly hearts. The entire movie was made for just $30m outside the studio system after Vaughn bought the rights and raised the budget independently. The result was a surprisingly raw and bloody paean to comic book culture that inspired one of Nicolas Cage’s finest performances of recent years as the Adam West-channelling Big Daddy, Hit Girl’s father and crime fighting mentor.
At the time it would have been little surprise to see Kick-Ass go on to rival the then-burgeoning Marvel films for future box office glory. Unfortunately, the 2010 film was followed by a weak, studio-produced sequel from the previously unheralded director Jeff Wadlow. A listless, drab effort, it introduced Jim Carrey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes as the successor to Big Daddy, the casting director perhaps assuming that only the Canadian comic could match Cage’s furniture-chewing superpowers.
Not a bad shout, you might think, except Carrey only gets 10 minutes of screen time, and subsequently refused to do the attendant publicity tour after denouncing his own movie’s “level of violence” in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. The sequel bombed at the box office after failing to inspire critics or audiences.
So why are we even discussing KickAss again, more than a decade on? Apparently Moretz, now 24 and having spent the previous decade cultivating a reputation as something of a minor scream queen, is open to a return. Teed up by Jimmy Fallon this week on The Tonight Show, she said: “I think it would be really fun to see where Hit Girl goes and what she is like as an adult. But I think it would have to be kind of perfect.”
Moretz went on to suggest that this would require the return of TaylorJohnson and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played villain Red Mist (later the Motherfucker), which seems reasonable. But I can’t help feeling she’s missing a trick here, because if Kick-Ass 3 ends up being another shallow, studioproduced retread, getting the old gang together (especially if that gang means the people who made Kick-Ass 2) really isn’t the answer here.
Somehow, Universal (which now owns the franchise) needs to find a way of restoring the outlandish, anarchic insouciance of the original movie. Otherwise, Hit Girl is just another female superhero with attitude, while Kick-Ass is a rubbish Spider-Man knock off who never quite worked out how to get his webshooters going.
That probably means getting Goldman to write the script and Vaughn to return to the director’s chair. At the very least the studio needs to find replacements with the renegade spirit to return this saga to its dissident roots. Without that basic investment in quality, the studio could bring Cage’s Big Daddy back from the dead and team him up with Christian Bale for a husky, deep-throated, Batman-themed shout off – and the result still probably wouldn’t be worth the price of entry.