It’s easy to let bad reviews put you off watching a film and that was probably true for a lot of people when it came to the release of Kick Ass 2 last August (2013). With a meagre 29% from Rotten Tomatoes and 41% from Metacritic it was well and truly trounced, but what they both miss out on is that for the audience that watched the film the reviews were a whole lot higher.
While both have audience review stats that put the film closer to 68%, the reality is that these aren’t the ones that show up in Google or on home entertainment download facilities like the Xbox ONE video, so there will be a fair few people that have passed it over because of the bad reviews. However, the reality is that if you were a fan of the original or like films like Super then the DVD is well worth a rent at least. It may be a silly film, but that’s largely what it sets out to be and as silly films go it’s not really all that bad.
The storyline picks up straight after the explosive end of the first film with Mindy Macready, AKA Hit Girl, and Dave Lizewski, Kick Ass, teaming up to fight crime. Things get tough as they try to live up to the expectations of their school kid normal life, especially for Mindy after the death of Big Daddy in the previous movie. However with Chris D’Amico angry at his father’s death he sets out to destroy them once and for all, replacing his former fallen superhero ultra-ego, Red Mist, with his new super villain status as the Motherfucker.
ChloĆ« Grace Moretz is nearly as bad mouthed as in the original and while the surprise element has definitely been cut down now that Hit Girl’s well into her mid teens, she’s still as destructive as she ever was in a fight. Aaron Taylor-Johnson doesn’t really bring a huge amout of character to Kick Ass, so you might not find yourself willing him on much during the film, but Christopher Mintz-Plasse is even more nefarious as the young evil villain than he was in the first movie.
The addition of other do-good superhero characters like Jim Carry as Colonel Stars and Stripes and Donald Faison (Scrubs) as Doctor Gravity works well to up the comedy potential of the movie. On the other hand, some of their baddy equivalents in the Motherfucker camp are a bit too stupid to impress, with the worst of a bad bunch being Olga Kurkulina as Mother Russia, who would have been a lot cooler if she’s been played with a lot less tongue-in-cheek. Although, it was cool to see Daniel Kaluuya breaking into a Hollywood movie as Black Death following his roles in Black Mirror and Psychoville.
Ultra-violence is once again at the centre of the film’s action. There is a gratuitous take on violence to the film, with things getting pretty real pretty fast, so there’s enough reason for people to take exception to it, but it’s difficult to see how it’s different from any superhero movie. It’s still about goodies beating the baddies at the end of movie.
The biggest negative to the film has got to be its over-reliance on the concept of social media references and text messages to make the film fit in with its school kid storyline. Watching text on the screen for a text conversation between Mindy and Dave does not make for scintillating dialogue or a connection to the youth of today.
In short, if you watched and liked the first Kick Ass film and still haven’t seen the sequel because of the overzealous presence of monumentally bad reviews then bite the mother-loving bullet and watch the DVD. It isn’t epic, but it’s definitely better than a lot of the critical reviews out there might have you believe.
Kick Ass 2 was produced by Marv Films (Layer Cake) and Brad Pitt’s studio, Plan B Entertainment (Marching Powder, World War Z), with Pitt as one of the co-producers of the movie. The DVD was released on the 9th December 2013 and to date it’s got an average review of 3.9 out of 5, so once again it’s gone down a lot better with the end viewers.
Kick Ass 2 DVD review: 3.4/5
