So I saw Kick-Ass 2 the other day
and I'm afraid to say that I gave in to temptation. Usually I'm a pretty decent
person but after seeing so much violence on screen, I couldn't help but grab a
gun and shoot the living shit out of a bunch of people. Oops! Star Jim Carrey
claims he can't support this violent film because of the shooting at Sandy Hook
which is strange because he filmed it after the shooting at Columbine.
Personally I haven't sat down and ranked the tragedy of high school massacres
like he apparently has but I guess we all have different hobbies. Obviously I didn't actually shoot anybody and obviously this film wouldn't encourage
anybody to do so that wasn't already a lonely, mental fucktard. Occasionally I
might punch my friend in the arm but that's only because he'll have hit me
first. I'm not sure why he attacks me although I'm guessing it's probably less
about the media desensitising him to violence as it is the seven previous hours
I spent joyously trying to piss him off.
Kick-Ass 2
takes place several years after the end of the first film despite the
characters having not moved on that much in the interim. Although Hit-Girl is
now fifteen years old, her story feels like it's only progressed about a week
since we left her back in 2010. I suspect that they would have liked to make
this a more immediate sequel but Chloe Moretz insisted on being such a diva and
stubbornly grew up... Human little bitch! So Hit-Girl is trying to lead a
normal school life, Kick-Ass is continuing to fight crime and Red Mist is still
trying to be seen as anyone other than McLovin. In at least that last case, I'd
say he succeeds with the character this time going under the catchy alias of ‘The
Motherfucker’. At first I was thinking that, that is clearly a superhero name
designed for Samuel L Jackson but then I realised that he would more likely be ‘The
Motherfucking Motherfucker’. The whole concept of Kick-Ass was to
explore what it'd be like to be a superhero in reality which bizarrely I
actually have some first-hand experience of. When not writing this shiz, I like
to blackmail people to appear in little films with one actually revolving
around a superhero. As it turns out, the public are fairly accepting of
somebody dressed up like a dick in a cape with nobody really questioning him at
all. In fact, things only got awkward later on when I filmed a girl eating a
banana in an alley and two junkie tramps appeared out of nowhere to watch,
dribble and finger their belly buttons.
Kick-Ass is
one of my favourite films of all time and so my excitement for the sequel was
pretty high. The original may have had violence and swearing but I fell in love
with the heart and naivety of the characters. Kick-Ass was a fucking idiot for
trying to fight crime but he did it for the right reasons and with the help of
a few friends he just about managed to get the job done. The fact that the film
also included a performance from a post-stroke Nicolas Cage and a young girl
who casually spits out the word ‘cunt’ only added to the joy. For me, a good
film can only be improved if it causes The Daily Mail to get its touchy little
titties in a twist. With Kick-Ass 2 though, I began to get kind of
worried when director Jeff Wadlow was hired. I'd seen his first film Never
Back Down and disliked it with about the same amount of hatred that Russia
currently has for equal rights and freedom. Still, I tried to keep my optimism
which became well and truly put to the test when the wave of bad reviews
arrived and started to rape the absolute fuck out of it.
Having now seen the movie I can say with
some relief that I actually really liked it. It definitely wasn't as good as
the first one but for me not much else is. In honesty I think the biggest
problem for this sequel is that what made the first so great is that it was
both original and shocking. When you're replicating and continuing what's gone
before, 'original' and 'shocking' are two of the things that just can't help
but be lost. It's kind of like the first time you toss one off- your brain
explodes with confusion and joy, but a week later, a kind of nonchalance has
set in that means you'll catch yourself lazily doing it at a bus stop if you
aren’t paying enough attention. I guess my point is that the sequel has to go
even further than the original to be as memorable because we now take for
granted everything that made the first such a breath of fresh air.
Unfortunately, Kick-Ass 2 simply replicates what has gone before it and
continues the story in a completely logical way. Not that I'm criticising the
story, rather the fact that we've become desensitised to everything here by the
simple fact of having seen it before. Fuck me- that was an effort to explain...
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| Guns don't kill people. Idiots who own guns do though... |
A further problem is that two of the things
that made the original so great were the randomness of Nicholas Cage and the
threat of Mark Strong's big bald bastard. To try and counter this, they have
this time added an almost unrecognisable Jim Carrey as the violent vigilante Colonel
Stars and Stripes. Despite earlier taking the piss out of his bizarre
distancing of this film, I am generally a fan of the big rubber gurner’s
previous work. Therefore the biggest problem with him here is that despite all
the controversy, hype and prominent billing, he's hardly in the fucking movie
anyway… which actually makes his subsequent comments make a lot more sense. His
role is really just an extended cameo but images of him committing acts of
violence could potentially cause awkwardness for him in light of his recent
anti-gun comments. Personally, I kind of agree that the public shouldn't have
access to handheld child-killing machines and so in that regard I'm on his
side. By denouncing Kick-Ass
2, not only has he brought attention to his cause
but he's also provided some presumably welcome marketing to a film that wants
to make money. Either that or he just couldn't be fucked with the boring press
junket. Regardless though, none of this really justifies quite how wasted he is
here. Nor is his implied link between movie violence and real violence in
anyway true. Although having said that, if like him I could train my dog to
bite off peoples’ cocks then I definitely would. If
Carrey is going to begin denouncing his appearance in comic book movies then
I'd strongly recommend he actually start with his performance in the crappy Batman
Forever as a bright green twat.
Speaking of people who are wasted, it seems
that another fault of the film is that it kind of forgets who it should be
about. I have a friend who claims to have the dullest possible dreams in which
she does menial things such as worry about paying her car tax. In her most exciting dream she was apparently
just pottering about like normal when a strange young girl walked past
suspiciously carrying a pair of scissors. That was pretty much the end of it.
What made me laugh about that was how in her dream-world, her brain had created
a story in which she wasn't even the main fucking character. It was inside her
head and yet this young girl with the scissors is clearly the focus of the
mystery and story. Well that's kind of what's going on here with the title
character of Kick-Ass being severely sidelined in favour of the demented little
killer imp Hit-Girl. I mean, Kick-Ass is present throughout but the character
development and arc is clearly dominated by the violent young bitch in the
purple wig. Not that I didn't enjoy spending so much time with her, by the way.
One of my favourite things about the franchise is in the fact that it's also a
kind of demented teen movie and so seeing her navigate her school life was
great. I also can't fault the empowering message of the film that you should
just be yourself regardless of whether or not you're a violent tween who kills
cunts with a sociopathic efficacy. It's just a shame that this means we have to
give up time with Kick-Ass who is less of a superhero and more of a geek who
wishes he was. As a single chap in his twenties with Star Wars toys scattered
around his bedroom, I find a geek with comic-inspired aspirations much easier
to relate to.
So yeah, like I said, the film isn't as good as
the first but I still enjoyed it. Maybe this wasn't literally the best film of
all time but it's still fun. Curious as to what I'd missed, I thought I'd check
out the terrible reviews to see what their issue was, with most just seeming
offended at the violence and bad fucking language. There was one thing though
that did surprise me and that was a huge amount of complaints in regards to the
films’ apparent misogynist tone. A lot of this focused around things such as a
dance scene in which a few girls had been sexualised, but the complaints also
forgot to mention that when Kick-Ass removes his shirt, he too is gorped at. I
guess the real conclusion here is that some people of both genders are
occasionally not completely fucking ugly. To be honest, I'd love to go into
this in more detail because I read a lot about it throughout the week but fuck
it, it'd take forever and we've all got lives. It just seemed to me that a lot
of the problems may have originated from the following slightly tactless
comment that Kick-Ass author Mark Millar made about rape a little while
earlier:
“The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad
some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don’t really think
it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to
show that somebody’s a bad guy.”
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| He looks like a boy who is good to his mother. |
People then complained that he was using rape
as a kind of badge to simply represent evil and that rape is actually much
worse than chopping of a head. Not to put myself in the firing line but I kind
of don't see a problem with what he said. Everything that happens in literature
is used to represent something and I don't see why rape should be exempt from
that. I'm not saying that it can't be executed in a sexist way but that what he
said alone certainly isn't. There's a bit in Transformers: Dark of the Moon in
which a woman is physically and aesthetically described in relation to a car
which I found so much more offensive than anything here. Also Millar didn't
specifically say female rape so to assume he's being sexist is kind of a
presumption in itself. As for rape being worse than getting your head chopped
off- well, how do I put this diplomatically... Get a fucking grip! Both are
horrific things that nobody deserves to ever endure but if I had to choose –trigger
warning- I'd rather get roughly beaten and arse fucked in an alley than just
get straight up brutally and sadistically murdered. There's no doubt at all
that rape victims also go through huge mental and physical trauma afterwards
and I think it's horrendous how in many cases the victims get the blame for
their own assault. But if you get your head chopped off then that's it. You're
dead. End of life. Rape must be a truly terrible thing to endure but getting so
mad about it being compared to decapitation seems kind of offensive to victims
of that too. In my opinion, people just got slightly up in arms about what
Millar said and so choose to look for evidence of any apparent sexism in his
work.
Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.
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