Kick-Ass 2

Rated R, 103 Mins.

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Jim Carrey

The summer winds down, the center cannot hold. Goodbye action movies and superhero flicks, hello Oscar set pieces and rom-coms. But in this last dying moment before the fall, we have Kick-Ass 2.

Thank you Kick-Ass 2, for refusing to take yourself seriously. After the brooding apocalyptic tale that was Man of Steel, it’s nice to have a movie about superheroes that actually captures the cartoonish fun and black-and-white morality of the comic books that inspired such fair without pandering to children. And in case it is somehow not clear from the title or the trailer: do not take your children to see this movie.

The main plot of this movie is like something from a high-end pro-wrestling event. No one in this universe has actual superpowers, so being a superhero is just a question of wearing a ridiculous outfit and beating up bad people with spray-painted blunt instruments. Eventually some people start self-identifying as super-villains, and a turf war begins between the forces of silly good and silly evil. It may be predictable, but the choreography is intense, and the film raises the stakes halfway through by inflicting serious physical and psychological harm on the good guys. It is all in keeping with the film’s unstated premise: putting on tights and fighting crime means getting your ass kicked. A lot.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the main hero, and his nasal and nerdy voiceovers help set the tone of the film. Christopher Mintz-Plasse returns as his rival, whose new name, costume, and origin are one giant Freudian joke. The high-profile addition of Jim Carrey is well worth whatever they paid him. He is almost unrecognizable, but incredibly fun to watch, as a born again Mafia leg-breaker clad in army fatigues, wielding a baseball bat and a trained German Shepherd.          

Once again, the film has the most fun with Chloe Grace Moretz’s Hit-Girl. Having shocked everyone with the level of violence and profanity she inflicts and is subject to over the first film, her attempt to try and fit in with a clique of “normal” high-school girls draws dark yet amusing parallels between super-villainy and the “mean-girl” tropes everyone has come to expect. This b-story gets wrapped up in an appropriately over-the-top fashion just in time for her to go back to stabbing and shooting people while wearing a purple schoolgirl outfit. This movie knows its audience, its pays lip-service to the dubiousness of her being essentially a brainwashed child-soldier, but it also recognizes that we enjoy the end-result. In the end Hit-Girl “learns” that killing bad guys makes her happy and is what she wants to do in life no matter how uncomfortable other people feel about it. That’s as close as this story gets to a moral arc.

Enjoy the violence. I cannot stress this enough. Savor watching human traffickers get hit in the head with pool sticks before having their testicles chewed on by German Shepherds.  If you are the type of person who laughed when Nazis got their brains bashed in in Inglorious Basterds, then I have a treat for you. One last gift of summer, like the final lick of a melted ice-cream cone.