Kick Ass 2 (2013)

Kick Ass 2 (2013)

Release Date:August 14, 2013

Kick Ass, the story of a DIY superhero, was a surprise hit upon its release in 2010, exceeding box office expectations, and receiving mostly positive reviews, to the point that the film is widely considered to be superior to the source comic. By contrast, the sequel was a critical and commercial flop, and on watching it, it’s not hard to see why.

Following her father’s murder near the end of the first film, Hit Girl has been adopted by her father’s colleague from his days on the force. Unlike her father, he’s a responsible parent and expects Hit Girl to go to school and not murder criminals, but old habits die hard. Kick Ass comes out of retirement due to boredom and joins Justice Forever, a team of bargain basement costumed vigilantes inspired by him, getting Hit Girl to train him up to be halfway decent at his job.

Meanwhile, Chris D’Amico, AKA the disgraced former superhero Red Mist, still desires revenge on Kick Ass for shooting his father with a rocket launcher, and re-invents himself as the world’s first supervillain, the Mother Fucker, after killing his mother in a tanning bed accident and fashioning her bondage gear into his costume. Of course, Chris is even more incompetent than Kick Ass, but he has a lot more money, so he scours the criminal underworld to build himself an army of henchmen and dresses them all up as Mad Max extras. He also manages to recruit Kick Ass’s friend Todd, who became a villain after his superhero persona Ass Kicker was rejected for being a palette-swapped Kick Ass knockoff.

With Hit Girl occupied by an extended parody of Mean Girls that also feels the need to stop the film dead in its tracks to play a Union J music video in full at one point, the Mother Fucker and his army of Mad Max extras go on a crime spree, murdering and assaulting numerous police officers, superheroes, and civilians, turning public opinion against costumed vigilantes and making them all liable to be arrested. An argument between Kick Ass and his father about the latter never achieving anything with his life leads him to turn himself in to the police as Kick Ass to protect his son. The Mother Fucker is surprised that he got what he wanted in the end, even if the crime wave had potentially scuppered it by prompting a Super Registration Act. “I meant to do that!

Todd accidentally lets slip that his keikaku didn’t go according to keikaku, as that’s Kick Ass’s dad, so the Mother Fucker arranges for him to be murdered in his cell and for photos to be sent to Kick Ass. Just to rub salt in the wound, he then sends his Mad Max extras to shoot up the funeral. Kick Ass and the rest of Justice Forever head for the Mother Fucker’s evil lair, with Hit Girl in tow now that she’s finished her Mean Girls subplot by using a brown note generator to give the plastics projectile vomit and explosive diarrhoea. The Mad Max extras are defeated, Hit Girl finishes off the Quirky Miniboss Squad, although she needs to take adrenaline before she can defeat her evil counterpart Mother Russia (Remember kids, drugs are awesome!), Todd takes after the comic relief redcoats in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and sneakily switches sides when nobody’s looking following the realisation that he’s the only villain not dressed as a Mad Max extra, and Kick Ass avenges his father and fallen Justice Forever members. Despite all his crimes, Kick Ass saves the Mother Fucker from falling because of their brief friendship, but Chris would rather die and lets go of Kick Ass’s hand to fall to his death. He survives thanks to falling into his shark tank containing a dead shark, but that’s soon rectified when it turns out the shark isn’t dead, it was just sleeping the whole time.

The secret to Kick Ass’s success was the tone. The comic was needlessly cynical with the idea, with just about everyone being a terrible person in some way. The film was much improved in this regard, being significantly more optimistic and willing to have fun with the concept. However, it didn’t shy away from being serious when it needed to be, which is most noticeable with the villains, who brought just enough menace that the film felt like there were consequences, but were still capable of being funny. Kick Ass 2, on the other hand, flubs this balance entirely. The film is significantly darker than the original, which would not be a problem in itself, except it takes after the comic’s idea of making most of the characters into assholes. For example, Katie Deauxma, the first film’s love interest, gets suddenly changed into an asshole to match her comic counterpart to justify getting rid of her. Because of how cynical the film is this time around, a lot of the humour falls flat, as it feels inappropriate for there to be humour in such a mean-spirited world.

The perfect representation of these issues is in the Mother Fucker himself. In the Kick Ass 2 comic, he’s a complete monster, committing atrocities such as gunning down children, bombing comic shops, killing dogs, and most infamously, raping Katie Deauxma and murdering her entire family. Thankfully, most of this isn’t in the film. Instead, the film portrays him as a laughable, harmless villain who desperately wants to be a complete monster, with the humour coming from how incompetent he is. This doesn’t work because even though he can’t do anything, or tries and fails, the things he wants to do are too horrible to be shaken off as jokes. This is exemplified by the film’s adaptation of the rape scene. A benefit of Katie Deauxma being written out is that she’s spared her comic fate, so the new love interest is the victim instead in the film – or she would be, if the Mother Fucker didn’t suffer erectile dysfunction as he was going to do the deed. Pathetically trying to masturbate into his cape doesn’t help, and only causes both his henchmen and his attempted victim to point and laugh at him. This tries to be funny, but because of how serious the context around it is, it comes off as tasteless instead. That’s not to mention why would a teenager be suffering from erectile dysfunction? Does that happen if you get nervous about the prospect of sex? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, but if someone could tell me if such a thing could actually happen, and isn’t just a narrative cop-out to avoid showing an innocent woman’s rape, that would be terrific.

There’s a fair bit more going on this time around than in the first film, and yet it doesn’t hang together nearly as well. The film feels much less cohesive, as Hit Girl’s Mean Girls plot and the Mother Fucker plot have no connection to each other, and the film doesn’t cut back and forth between them as you would expect. Instead, the Hit Girl plot is covered in its entirety, and the Mother Fucker plot starts once the Mean Girls plot is finished. This is probably because the film adapts a Hit Girl spin off comic as well as Kick Ass 2, which makes the decision not to combine them weird, particularly since the film changed other things. On the plus side, Kick Ass’s father and the Mother Fucker’s Uncle Ralph, who runs the mob from his prison cell, make the most of what little screen time they have. Uncle Ralph in particular only has one scene, yet he’s the most memorable character. It’s almost enough to make me lament that there most likely won’t be a Kick Ass 3 where he replaces Chris D’Amico as the main antagonist. Almost.

It’s a shame that, after such a promising debut film, Kick Ass 2 drops the ball as much as it does. The first film’s strength was in not holding itself too closely to the comic, which is a strategy the sequel does not continue with, and it suffers for it. The result is a muddled, unpleasant film that suggests Kick Ass and Hit Girl should hang up their capes.

4/10