Kick-Ass 2

KICK-ASS 2

** SPOILERS **

Justice Forever

In Kick-Ass 2, writer-director Jeff Wadlow (Never Back Down) takes over the reigns from the original's director (now producer) Matthew Vaughn and writer Jane Goldman. Glad to say, Wadlow doesn't Schumacher it. Or Ratner it. If Wadlow doesn't quite transcend the material, which he adapts almost warts and all (a rape scene and a dog killing are wisely excised) from the graphic novels "Hit-Girl" and "Kick-Ass 2" by comic book maestros Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., or bring much shocking and new to the Kick-Ass movie universe, he admirably maintains the same ribald, downright offensive joie de vivre that made Kick-Ass the best and most shameless superhero surprise of 2010. The ending of Kick-Ass screamed for more Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass 2 is the More Kick-Ass we wanted.

Kick-Ass 2 continues the misadventures of the eternally naive and earnest Dave Lizewski (an impressively buff Aaron Johnson), the green-and-yellow wetsuited boy wonder the world knows as the superhero Kick-Ass. His exploits to rid New York City of the crime lord played by Mark Strong in the original has inspired others to take up the noble cause of spandex and protect New York City from evildoers. Which is great, because after all the ass-kickings he's endured, being a lone crusader fighting crime on the mean streets terrifies Kick-Ass. He's better equipped to kick some ass this time around; he's been trained by the deadliest and greatest superhero alive, Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz, now a taller teen and owning the movie every second she's on camera). This training includes Hit-Girl gleefully shooting him in the chest and in the back. But that's no more than she herself endured from her beloved daddy, the late Big Daddy, who, Hit-Girl is proud to point out, is the true first superhero of this world, not Kick-Ass like the public believes.

Meanwhile, Kick-Ass's hilariously unhinged arch enemy Chris (the scenery-chewing Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the former superhero Red Mist, has reinvented himself as The Mother Fucker, the world's first supervillain, clad in his late Real Housewives of Long Island mother's black latex S&M accoutrements. The Mother Fucker's sole goal in life is to spend his vast inherited fortune to kill Kick-Ass, and also destroy the city, because that's what a supervillain does according to all the comic books he's ever read. To wit, The Mother Fucker charges his personal Alfred John Leguizamo ("Did you just call me your butler?") to help him assemble a cadre of murderers he can outfit in garish supervillain costumes, complete with race-baiting codenames, which Leguizamo scolds him about to no avail. The Mother Fucker's greatest find is Mother Russia - imagine a female Ivan Drago from Rocky IV but wearing a revealing red leather bikini and more than willing to brutally massacre a dozen police officers.

Kick-Ass finds the camaraderie he seeks when he is recruited into Justice Forever, the world's first superhero team, banded together in the New York City warehouse basement of their leader Colonel Stars and Stripes (a subdued Jim Carrey flawlessly translating the upright character from the comic books). These harmless do-gooders include Dr. Gravity (neither a doctor nor a master of gravity, played by Donald Faison), Battle Guy (revealed to be Kick-Ass's nerdy high school chum Marty, played by Clark Duke), and the fetching Night Bitch (Lindy Booth), Kick-Ass's sexy new squeeze. Kick-Ass and Night Bitch's back alley sexual liaisons (masks always on) recalls Spider-Man's rooftop romps with The Black Cat. (Kick-Ass's girlfriend Lyndsy Fonseca is quickly written out of the sequel after a misunderstanding, but I believe she is brutally murdered in the comic book, so she thankfully got off easy here.) The world's greatest superheroes Justice Forever are not, but they do somehow manage to effectively fight crime and they have a really cool logo emblazoned on their headquarters' meeting room table.

Hit-Girl, however, can't be part of Justice Forever, as she attempts to assimilate into normal high school life at the urging of her kindly guardian, played by Morris Chestnut. Moretz more or less headlines her own movie within a movie, a Kick-Ass parody of Mean Girls, as Hit-Girl makes a genuine attempt to become one of the Plastics of her high school. (One of the side effects Hit-Girl discovers of being a normal teenage girl is a sudden, unexpected attraction to guys with smoldering pouts and ripped abs, a sexual awakening Big Daddy never trained his favored child for.) Facing down an alley full of thieves and murderers is no problem for Hit-Girl, but the bitches bullying her in high school is a new dilemma she can't solve with martial arts and samurai swords. Luckily, Hit-Girl has other wonderful toys at her disposal to teach the Queen B and Wannabes a lesson.

The specter of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, sorely missed) hangs over Hit-Girl as Kick-Ass 2 plumbs new themes of living up to your parents' wishes for its three primary characters. Hit-Girl is torn between fulfilling the destiny her father trained her for and following her ersatz father's wishes to attempt to have a normal life free from spandex and killing. The Mother Fucker's entire existence is all about getting revenge on Kick-Ass for exploding his father with a bazooka (his fearsome uncle imprisoned in Riker's Island played by Game of Thrones' Iain Glen is introduced, setting the stage for Kick-Ass 3). Meanwhile, Kick-Ass himself deals with his own father discovering his crime fighting secret and then protecting his son from The Mother Fucker's vengeance, at the cost of his life. In the end, Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl, and The Mother Fucker are all orphans, as all classic comic book characters must be. Kick-Ass 2 also directly asks the question of what good superheroes actually do in the real world ("If we're trying to make the world a better place, why is it so much worse?") Kick-Ass 2 reaches the reasonable conclusion.

While the gleeful novelty of the original Kick-Ass and viscera-soaked shock value of eleven year old Hit-Girl somersaulting around and dismembering bad guys while cursing like a sailor is unavoidably lost, Kick-Ass 2 succeeds in its escalation of the world and the stakes therein.  The final balls to the wall superheroes vs. supervillains showdown - West Side Story in spandex - is appropriately ultraviolent, with Kick-Ass and The Mother Fucker leading the charge in the fight of their lives. The super smackdown between Hit-Girl and Mother Russia (Hit-Girl scoping out the baddest dog in the yard and taking her on personally) is actually more brutal and satisfying than both times Batman fought Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Everything in Kick-Ass 2 is more personal for all of the main characters. Without Nicolas Cage and Mark Strong's sturdy anchors, Johnson, Moretz and Mintz-Plasse rise to the occasion and take full ownership of the franchise; three masked teenagers hellbent on tearing shit apart and shoehorning themselves into a world that doesn't actually need them, except to save it from each other.

Ass Kicked

** SPOILERS! SEE KICK-ASS FIRST! **

Kick-Ass holds up completely upon a second viewing. The first viewing was an unexpected blitz. Pure, sugary candy for the senses. While enjoying the charge from the audience that was seeing it for the first time, I cast a more critical gaze at Kick-Ass, hoping it would still work for me once the audacious shock value is gone. It does. Kick-Ass is a propulsive, superhero genre roller-coaster joyride the first time around, but upon closer inspection, it's just a damned excellent movie.

The iconography cheerfully borrowed from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man stood out even more. Dave Lizewski's house is pretty much exactly like Aunt May's house where Peter Parker lived. Dave's father looks a lot like Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben. (Hilarious moment when he hesistantly asked his son if the muggers who put him in the hospital raped him.)  Kick-Ass spends time in rooftops and alleys resembling the ones Spider-Man visits. (Speaking of which, why do the characters keep walking through that one alley where they know the two muggers always hang out?) Kick-Ass even has a moment in a cemetery that fleetingly calls back the end of Spider-Man when Peter lied to Mary-Jane in a cemetery about not loving her. Lastly, Kick-Ass' jet pack flight across Manhattan with Hit-Girl was Kick-Ass' way of tipping its hat to all of the thrilling moments of Spidey slinging his webs and soaring through New York's skyscrapers. All due respect to the Web-head, but that jet pack ride was way cooler.

Upon first viewing, I didn't quite register the enormous billboard of Claudia Schiffer in the center of the shot when Kick-Ass first meets Hit-Girl and Big Daddy on the rooftops.  But hey, if you're director Matthew Vaughn and you're married to one of the world's most beautiful supermodels, why not put a billboard of her in your superhero movie?

Besides the obvious references to Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan's Batman films, there are plenty of amusing odes to other superhero movies sprinkled throughout Kick-Ass. My favorite is when Kick-Ass decides to look for a missing cat (and he failed to actually bring that cat home.) Whether writer Jane Goldman intended to or not, to me, the superhero trying to save a cat in a movie is a cleverly subtle reference to Richard Donner's first Superman movie.  Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel, on his first night out as Superman stopping bank robbers and Air Force One crashing, took a moment to save a little girl's cat from a tree. I just like the idea of superheroes taking time out from their busy schedules to save pets for some reason. (And the joke is, of course, Kick-Ass didn't have a busy schedule.)

The first time I saw Kick-Ass, I assumed its use of John Murphy's eerie score from 28 Weeks Later was temp music that would be replaced in the final cut.  Imagine my surprise when I found it remains in the final cut. Surprise and delight, because Murphy's score worked incredibly well, adding a powerful layer of shock and dread in the scene where we see Big Daddy massacre Mark Strong's henchman in the lumber factory.

To me, the great, bravura sequence of Kick-Ass is when Big Daddy and Kick-Ass are being tortured and are about to be unmasked live on the Internet and Hit-Girl arrives to save the day. Everything about the sequence is incredible: Hit-Girl hitting the lights, plunging the room into darkness, then turning on her night vision goggles. I love the way director Vaughn shot Hit-Girl's POV to resemble a first person video game - one of the many canny ways Kick-Ass uses the language of video games that young people innately understand to work for the movie (to the chagrin of all the older fuddy duddies; sorry, Roger Ebert and friends).  The use of strobe lights and gunshot flashes so we see fragmentary glimpses of Hit-Girl in action - like comic book panels come to life - was genius.  Each time, this sequence absolutely kicks my ass.

Most important are the performances of the actors and the emotions of the characters in the sequence.  The way Big Daddy, burning to death and in unimaginable pain, shouts combat tactics to his daughter, and how she complies without question, absorbing his instructions and executing flawlessly.  "CHILD!"  The mixture of pride Big Daddy feels for his daughter mixed with the sadness of knowing this is the end of him and he's leaving his beloved daughter alone to fend for herself really got me.  The violence and style of Kick-Ass has been accurately compared to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, but the difference is that I never cared about The Bride or any of the characters in Kill Bill the way Vaughn, his writers, and the actors made me like and care about the characters in Kick-Ass.

It will be quite a challenge for Kick-Ass 2 to replicate or surpass what they achieved here, especially without the benefit of Mark Strong and Nicolas Cage in the cast.  On the other hand, Kick-Ass has a blazing new star in Chloe Grace Moretz.  (I loved the moment at the very end when Moretz cracked her knuckles in giddy anticipation of smacking down the bullies at her new high school who foolishly thought they could shake her down for lunch money. They have no idea of the wolf in their fold.) Vaughn has gone on record as calling Moretz the "Jodie Foster of this generation". It's hard to disagree. Foster famously played a 13 year old prostitute in Taxi Driver - controversial for its time - but she needed Travis Bickle to protect her. Foster's prostitute was no Hit-Girl. She never kicked ass.

Kick-Ass (****)

KICK-ASS

** SPOILERS! DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU SEE KICK-ASS!!**

Kick-Ass is a shocking, disturbing, depraved, ultra-violent, and wildly entertaining superhero movie. Ten years into our modern (marvel) age of comic book movies, our culture and a generation of moviegoers are, by now, overly familiar with the conventions of the superhero movie genre. Zack Snyder's Watchmen attempted some commentary on superhero movies the way the graphic novel deconstructed the comic book superhero on the printed page; now Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass goes all the way with its mission: to shine a light on probably the most popular superhero movie of the 2000's, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, break it into its base components, and reassemble it with a winking, post-modern self-awareness fused with uncompromising, joyous bloodletting reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. Kick-Ass lives up to its name, and then some.

Vaughn shoots Kick-Ass in a bright, cheery style similar to what Sam Raimi employed in his Spider-Man trilogy. In an ode to its comic book origins, all of the superhero costumes in Kick-Ass employ the basic primary color combinations (green and yellow, black and purple, black and red, black and yellow) that would have been available to Marvel Comics in the golden and silver ages. The main color that stands out, however, is red. Blood red. For the copious amounts of human viscera splattered all over the screen.

In a way akin to the "sideways reality" of the final season of Lost, Kick-Ass could be seen as the "sideways" alternate reality of Spider-Man.Vaughn and his writers Jane Goldman (screenplay) and Mark Millar (comic book source material) assembled a witty, knowing screenplay that honors Spider-Man's tropes very closely:  Nerdy but bright-eyed and likeable New York teenager (Brooklyn this time, not Queens, though he lives in virtually identical dwellings as Peter Parker) Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) decides to put on a garish wetsuit costume (that he designs on notebook paper) and attempts to patrol his neighborhood as the superhero Kick-Ass. He gets his ass-kicked, a lot. What else would or could happen?

One of the most fun things about Kick-Ass is that the filmmakers are so aware of Spider-Man and other superhero movies, they can confidently make multiple digressions and gleefully comment on them. Spider-Man's hoary old "with great power comes great responsibility" chestnut is wittily parodied as "With no power comes no responsibility."  Kick-Ass' best friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse - McLovin from Superbad) is the wealthy son of a master criminal (the always-terrific Mark Strong - the go-to villain these days and the future Sinestro in Green Lantern), dons a costume himself, and becomes his arch enemy Red Mist, a la Harry Osborn, the new Green Goblin. Red Mist comes complete with his own tricked out Mistmobile so he and Kick-Ass can hilariously rock out to his iPod while they patrol the streets of New York in style.

Kick-Ass totally one-ups Spider-Man in the young hero's love interest, Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca).  To their credit, the filmmakers don't even attempt a "love triangle" as found in Spider-Man, and instead give their hero the kind of sex life a teenage superhero ought to have (and teenagers in the audience can really root for.) Spider-Man only got to famously kiss MJ in an alley; Kick-Ass gets to have full-on sex with Katie in an alley, and in her bedroom. Nice! Sure, he had to pretend he was gay to get to know her first, but it was all for the greater good. There will be no complaints from fanboys that Katie isn't "hot enough" as there were for Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane Watson. Fonseca's Katie is ideal; a super pretty but accessible teen dream superhero girlfriend.

The very idea of the costumed superhero even existing is dismissed as "impossible" by Lizewski's two interchangeable nerdy best friends because people with superpowers don't exist. Lizewski is stabbed, run over by a car, and is very nearly killed in his first outing as Kick-Ass; this cleverly creates an opportunity to give him a "power" of a sort: metal grafted to his bones ("I look like Wolverine!") and deadened nerve endings, which allow him to absorb brutal amounts of punishment. But even though Kick-Ass can take a bloody licking and keep on ticking, he's an untrained, generally ineffective thrill seeker proud of his naivete. Gradually, Kick-Ass loses his superhero innocence when he gets caught up in machinations way over his head, learning the true evil that lurks in the hearts of men.

The ultimate statement on the lost innocence of the superhero in Kick-Ass is reflected in its two greatest creations: the father-daughter dynamic duo of Hit-Girl and Big Daddy. They're the real superheroes of Kick-Ass; the best equipped, best trained, and by far the most violent caped crusaders trying to bring down Mark Strong's criminal empire. They are Batman and Robin crossed with the Punisher, yet somehow cooler than all three combined. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, operating from the shadows at first, drive the main story and embody the ultimate tragedy of the piece. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy are so intriguing, they overshadow Kick-Ass until he gets caught up in their tangled web with Strong.

Chloe Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl is the breakthrough character of Kick-Ass. Hit-Girl is the snarling child sidekick of Batman's worst nightmares. The very conception and execution of this character is so very wrong, yet so completely amazing. She's the one everybody will be talking about (and dreading their daughter or little sister will emulate). Moretz, who memorably played Joseph Gordon-Levitt's worldly, relationship-savvy little sister in (500) Days of Summer, steals Kick-Ass completely. As the most foul-mouthed ("cocksucker", "cunts", and "douche" are some off her decidedly un-comic booky dialogue) and brutally violent 11 year old girl ever seen in a superhero movie, Moretz nevertheless infuses Hit-Girl with a vulnerability and genuine love for her father that makes her as endearing as she is fearsome to evildoers. As Hit-Girl, Moretz puts a bullet in Natalie Portman in The Professional and takes her place as the most bad ass killer pre-teen girl ever in movies. Even Strong's super-baddie had to remark that he wishes he had a son like her.

As Big Daddy, Nicolas Cage hasn't been this much fun to watch since he turned action hero in the mid-1990's. Delivering his lines with an amusing Adam West-like staccato, Cage alternates between being an obsessed crime fighter and a caring father (if a caring father willingly and repeatedly shoots his 11 year old daughter in the chest to teach her how to take a gunshot - one of the many uncomfortable but huge laugh-inducing moments in Kick-Ass). The sequence where Hit-Girl tries to save Kick-Ass and Big Daddy from being executed on the Internet, violently massacring Strong's henchmen as Big Daddy burns to death while shouting instructions to his "child!", is utterly spectacular. Cage, who was once to be Tim Burton's Superman and toplined Mark Steven Johnson's banal Ghost Rider, finally hit the superhero movie jackpot.

Beyond the epic, blood-splattered violence of Kick-Ass, and its uncanny commentary on movie superheroes (taking Your Friendly Neighborhood Wall-Crawler and the Dark Knight in stunningly disturbing directions), the real heroic feat achieved by Vaughn and the filmmakers was to create characters you really do care about. They may be clad in garish costumes, and they may be the most prolific mass murders who ever donned a mask and a codename, but the superheroes of Kick-Ass are anything but two-dimensional. Kick-Ass is a superhero movie marvel for this heroic age, and it made a true believer out of me.

Read Essay: Ass Kicked