Crim at the movies: Kick-Ass 2

Allow me to kick-start this review by saying Merry-Christmas and a Happy New Year to everybody on the site. You keep me happy in times of doubt. So, with that now officially out of the way. My previous blog mentioned that I was indeed reviewing Kick-Ass 2, and here you go. Freshly baked and straight out of the oven. This will be a short review due to events happening at this moment.



With his heroic antics having inspired a citywide wave of masked vigilantes, Kick-Ass/ Dave returns ranks to help clean up the streets. With Hit Girl/Mindy retiring from the super-hero business and trying to become a normal teenager and Kick-Ass fighting alongside a super-hero team, former Red Mist, has decided to become a super villain, calling himself The Motherf***er and forming an army of Super-Villains.



The characters of the first film were iconic characters of the series. You remember Hit-Girl and Big Daddy fighting crime *extreme violence implied* against the D'Amico’s and their army of criminals. You even remember the victims of the first film, from the guy blowing into a gory mess in a life sized microwave to the guy being handcuffed inside of his car and hearing his screams of agony and watching him be crushed by the car crusher. I remembered the original because of these characters, the characters may be familiar in some ways but the writer and director have changed, and not to any great advantage to the film. The sequel does have some development of the characters, but nothing truly memorable. One really good thing about this film is Chloë Moretz's Hit-Girl as she steals the spotlight, again. Hit Girl’s martial-arts scenes look terrifically good. Her character is not only well made, but her complex sub-plot in this movie is also a very interesting concept to deal with. As she enters high school at the age of 15, Hit-Girl finds that despite her warrior skills and physical strength becoming greater and greater with every passing day, she is placed under pressure to abandon everything and be a normal, simpering teenager interested only in clothes and boys. That was what she promised her deceased father, and what she now has to promise her new guardian, Marcus. This sub-plot is typical in your standard classic teen-movie plot, but while Hit-Girl could take on everyone and everybody and look damn good in doing so, teenage and social norms have made her weak and pathetic, while secretly boiling with frustration. I liked it, despite the Mean Girls references I was tempted to write. Kick-Ass 2 actually shows us her blossoming adolescence… defined on her terms and with none of the misogynistic judgment with which most movies handle women's desires

Jim Carrey is a huge actor to have taken interest in this movie, and his character was also quite clever but also a letdown.. The role was underwritten and amounts to nothing more than an extended cameo in an honest sense. Speaking of cameo’s, Iain Glen has a cameo as an imprisoned gangster who created an tense scene during his short time on screen, and magician and actor Andy Nyman appears as a bad guy insidiously named the Tumor (I thought that this was clever).

Screenplay is taken up once again with this series. It’s oblivious that the first film was, even by Hollywood standards, extremely violent. This takes the blood and violence from the first film, crushes them like paper, throws them around the room and then spread out to remove the creases while still trying to retain its style. It is a sadistic and bloody event. This violence is not a bad thing as it is obviously intended for an adult audience, but this is quite high on the scale of Hollywood Violence.

Likewise, the endless scenes of bloodshed and dismemberment: Wadlow has a feel for action – and one speeding van shoot-out is great. But you can’t help feeling this sequel kicks less ass than it should. This movie is watchable, but did not live up towards the hype that it was reaching. A good movie if you have nothing to watch and you have free time.

This movie has scored Three out of Five Lionheart’s