kick-ass 2

Kick-Ass 2 is not terrible, but it has a lot of problems.

The overall ones are:

1) This is an action movie directed by someone who can’t direct action very well – certainly not as well as Matthew Vaughn. One area where Kick-Ass didn’t get enough credit (in anything I ever read) was that you could always follow the fight scenes, both the action itself and the geography of where it was taking place. Not so here.

2) Vaughn produced Kick-Ass independently and then sold it to a studio. He has said (and I believe him) that there were scenes there which every studio said had to come out (and which he knew had to be in).

This movie was produced by a studio, and it’s tonally all over the place. Say what you want about Kick-Ass, and I completely understand why some people hated it, it was the product of a very specific artistic sensibility.

For example, this is a movie about a high school senior (played by an actor who’s clearly in his mid-twenties) whose strongest emotional attachment is to a fifteen-year-old girl, and a fifteen-year-old girl who has (to her alarm) started to notice boys (and specifically to notice the increasingly muscular and sculpted torso of her crime-fighting partner). The movie introduces this idea, and then immediately starts to tiptoe away from it, hoping nobody had noticed.

Not that they should have ended up in a relationship or anything, but if you’re going to bring up an idea like this, you have to carry it though to some resolution.

 
More specific problems include:

1) A main villain who is a mess as a character (dweeby, whiny, pathetic, psychotic, funny, scary). Christopher Mintz-Plasse has no idea how to play him, so he overplays pretty much all the way through, but the fault is in the screenplay. Mintz-Plasse does have one scene where he underplays, and it’s his one really good scene – it gives an indication of how it could have worked if they’d been willing to make the character really scary and not worked so hard on making him safe and funny, too.

2) Secondary villains who are completely uninteresting (and also not scary). They’re as underdeveloped as the second-level X-Men in First Class. They’re really only there because the plot demands that there be a team.

3) This is a movie that ends up being about three orphans, all deeply affected by the deaths of their fathers and all pretty much indifferent to the deaths of their mothers. This gets rather creepy when you see what a pattern it is.

 
Kick-Ass 2 is not a complete disaster, though. Jim Carrey doesn’t deliver quite the level of crazy that Nicholas Cage brought to the first one, but Colonel Stars & Stripes is a worthy successor to Big Daddy.

The superhero team Colonel Stars & Stripes and Kick-Ass assemble around them is pretty cool. Pathetic and inept, of course, but they’re all really specifically pathetic and inept (the opposite of the generic villainous team). They’re fun to spend time with.

The high school scenes, mostly of Mindy (Hit-Girl) trying to fit in with her (theoretical) peers, are pretty good. The cheerleader audition scene that’s teased here is terrific.

Because, of course, everybody knows who the star of this movie is.  As one review put it:

“If it works at all, fitfully, it’s because of the precociously talented and in-control [Chloe] Moretz, who carries the film on her own small shoulders.

“She snaps out her lines with verve and authority; she has a wonderful physicality in her no-joke fight scenes. And she does a lot with a little. In one quiet scene she conveys a depth of feeling simply by the way she walks away from the camera.”

And, as another reviewer pointed out, she does very good work with some really mediocre dialogue. For one example, the movie is full of characters asserting variations on: “Dude, this is real life – it’s not a comic book!” This line is delivered over and over (and over), but to no specific purpose, since the movie has no idea what to do with the thought beyond stating and restating it.

 
So, to tie this into my “storytelling lessons” series, the main lessons here are:

1) Carry through on the ideas you bring up. If you don’t want to take something through to some kind of pay-off, leave it out.

2) Play to your strengths.

3) Have an antagonist who’s worthy of your protagonist (and vice versa).

Later:

There’s an additional point to learn, I think, which is that not every story should get a sequel. Some are just fine as they are.