Trigger warning, just FYI, it happens in the movie so I discuss it here.
So I saw Kick Ass 2 today (who'd a thunk?) and I was disappointed. I mean, if we were to use a meal analogy, I was looking for a cheap burger off the dollar menu: I know I'm not supposed to eat it, but it's a vice, and honestly I could eat them two or three at a time. What I got was a handful of popcorn and a cup of tap water (which made for a meal at the video store I worked at growing up more than once, unfortunately, when I forgot to pack a lunch and didn't want to wait to get home); the movie was certainly a movie, it did fill up two hours, me and me droogs got our fill of the old ultra-violence, but I'll probably never watch it again.
I think it's because the movie was all over the place tonally. There's a reason that Batman movies are never mob movies even though most of Batman's enemies are, in fact, the mob. It's because while the violence the Joker commits is heinous and dark, it's still not real violence. What I mean by that is that when the Joker shoves a pencil into a man's eye socket, we know that doesn't actually happen at mob meetings. We're seeing an embodiment of evil doing over-the-top evil things. This sets a background for a good vs. evil story. What you don't see is Nicky Santoro stabbing a guy in the neck with a pen, or Tommy DeVito and James Conway murdering Billy Bats in the trunk of a car. That's because that sort of violence is shown so we can realize the brutish reality of what being a criminal is actually about.
The point of Kick Ass, and what I think the first movie does a passable job at doing, is showing the real violence that would actually occur when a man in a mask tries to be a "real-life superhero." That's why my least favorite scene in the first movie is when Kick Ass shoots the guy at the end with a bazooka. And the second movie is full of that stuff: a great contrast is Kick Ass's first fight in the original and his first fight in the sequel: in the original, he gets beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car, and ends up in the emergency room. In the sequel, he gets beat while on the ground for a good while, then gets up. And just in time for "witty banter" with Hit Girl. Now if Kick Ass 2 had only been that kind of over-the-top the whole time I might have liked it more as a guilty pleasure, but it wasn't.
There's a scene that exemplifies what I mean: The Mofo' and one of his goons have captured a female hero and he outright says he's going to rape her. Then he . . . can't get it up? So he . . . tries? All the while his Russian comrade murders ten cops outside while the Tetris theme plays. Here we have a brutal scene of real violence that's then played for laughs as a ridiculous cartoon show occurs outside. Am I supposed to be horrified at the violence? Am I supposed to be enjoying the action? Am I supposed to be laughing at his impotence? Because I can't do all three at once. Also, the Mean Girls parody seemed like it belonged more in a Jason Friedberg movie (Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a movie must always be somber to be good, but I am saying that an E.D. joke during a rape scene isn't funny or well done. You can put comedy and violence next to each other (for a good example, watch the far superior Cabin in the Woods), but you can't put wacky comedy and realistic (not in the visual effects sense, but in the tonal sense) violence together because only a sociopath thinks that realistic violence is wacky: look at the opening of The Departed. When Frank Costello laughs at the ways the bodies of his victims fell, Mr. French tells him there's something wrong with him. If Mr. French was in the theater of Kick Ass 2, he probably would have thought there was something wrong with anyone who completely, 100% enjoyed every minute of it.
And don't even get me started on the tacked on and confused moral messages. HEY MOVIE! If I wanted a movie to teach me a lesson about being all I can be, I wouldn't be going to Kick Ass.
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