Piece of Crap

Kick-Ass 2: written by Mark Millar; illustrated by John Romita Jr. and Tom Palmer (2010-2012/Collected 2012): This is a dreadfully written comic book. The movie adaptation was bad, but its source material is much worse. One page may be a parody of super-hero comics, thud-footed in that parody though it is. Then there might be a moment of reflection on how real life isn't like comic books. But then we're back to tiny, 12-year-old Hit Girl beating up or killing everyone she fights, or a former Russian security officer killing 10 cops with no problem whatsoever because she and Hit Girl really do operate pretty much exactly like R-rated super-heroes and super-villains. 

So much for life not being like a comic book. 

We also get the gang rape of a high-school student. Ha ha, what larks, Pip! What larks! 

The 'super-villain' keeps a shark in a tank as he tries to create the lair of a Silver Age comic-book villain! And the rape's just one lesson the titular Kick-Ass gets taught about how life isn't like a superhero comic, except for those sections of the comic when it's exactly like the sort of super-hero comic Mark Millar writes, over and over again, ad nauseum. 

John Romita Jr. does his usual professional job, though he struggles to draw realistic teenagers and really, really, really struggles with the depiction of Hit-Girl, a 12-year-old girl whose head is the same size as her torso. Actually, this may not be a struggle -- there's clearly an ironic depiction of Hit Girl as a Keane-Kid moppet who's also a killing machine, sort of like Funzo, which is not what I had while reading this piece of crap. I paid a dollar for this collected edition. It was too much. Not recommended.

Unfunny Games

Kick-Ass 2: adapted and directed by Jeff Wadlow from the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.; starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass), Chloe Grace Moretz (Hit Girl), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Chris D'Amico), Jim Carrey (Colonel Stars and Stripes),  and Clark Duke (Marty) (2013): Wow. This isn't the worst superhero movie ever made, but it certainly tries to be. But what's weird is that the abrupt tonal shifts, from quasi-satirical bloodbath to schmaltz and back again, aren't that unusual in modern action movies. The modern blockbuster is often half-sentimentality, half-affectless spectacle.

I do wonder how much studio re-writing and re-editing occurred. The movie doesn't build to anything. Moreover, it has an awful lot of scenes in which people endlessly explain their motivations. Jim Carrey is only in the movie for 8 minutes. Earnest scenes of sentimentality butt up against a badly written riff on Mean Girls or Heathers. Schmaltzy death scenes and funeral scenes abruptly give way to scenes of carnage played strictly for laughs.

The 'comical' violence gets a bit jarring when one 'comical' Russian super-villain kills ten police officers in assorted 'hilarious' ways. But then we're back to nominal hero Kick-Ass telling someone that this "isn't a comic book." Well, no, it isn't. It's a terrible, terrible movie. And yet it's strangely symptomatic of a lot of action movies. It's a mess, and everything about it rings completely false.

The first Kick-Ass was an over-praised but enjoyable parody of super-heroes that turned into a bombastic superhero movie by the end. This is all bombast, even the ostensive satire. Michael Moorcock might call it "deadly jolite," and he'd be right. Not recommended unless you're writing a Ph.D. dissertation on superhero movies.