More moral than first film
JIM Carrey recently announced that he wouldn’t be publicising Kick-Ass 2, because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, he didn’t want to endorse such a violent film.
I think he’s mistaken. It’s true that Kick-Ass 2 is so violent that it might have been named “Gouge-Eye 2” or “Stab-Leg 2”. And it’s true that much of its violence features Carrey, who plays a punch-drunk Captain America wannabe called Colonel Stars and Stripes.
But it’s far more moral than most action movies – and it’s certainly more moral than the first Kick-Ass instalment three years ago.
Both films begin by asking what would happen if an ordinary teenage schoolboy (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) decided to put on a costume and call himself a superhero, but the original Kick-Ass soon betrayed that premise. Its director, Matthew Vaughn, was too much in love with his show-offy camerawork and editing to stay in the real world.
The writer-director of the follow-up, Jeff Wadlow, keeps its tone under tighter control. Kick-Ass 2 may be a foul-mouthed knockabout comedy, but it engages with the ethics of being a fancy-dressed vigilante; it explores why costumed crime-fighting might appeal to alienated adolescents; and it examines how such oddball behaviour would affect society at large.
It also keeps reiterating that violence has consequences.
Its hero receives ass-kickings more often than he gives them, and he’s left bruised and bleeding as a result.
Even the pint-sized Hit Girl (the terrific Chloë Grace Moretz) is forced to question whether beating up muggers is really the best way to pass one’s childhood, or whether going to a suburban high school might be a safer occupation (it’s a close call).
Compared with Man of Steel, which was happy to demolish densely populated neighbourhoods for the sake of a fight scene, Kick-Ass 2 is practically a public service announcement.
Another point in Wadlow’s favour is that, unlike the makers of such angst-fests as The Dark Knight and Iron Man 3, he acknowledges the fundamental silliness of the superhero conceit: one character backs out of an evening’s crime-busting because he has tickets for The Book of Mormon.
If only Kick-Ass 2 had left some of its slow and repetitive subplots on the cutting room floor, it might have been one of Carrey’s best films.