Sorry for not writing a blog last week but some idiot forgot to pay my internet bill. 

Yeah, it was me.

I didn’t actually give my yay or nay on Kick-Ass2 so I wanted to do that right quick.

The quick version is that it’s pretty good but not great. I know that unforgivably ambiguous but honestly it’s so in the middle I can’t really give a definitive answer.

 My main problem is that the movie changes certain things from the comic but those things don’t make sense with what they kept.

The biggest problem is with the hit girl character that gets a whole new story added to her arc which makes sense, seeing how she’s the most interesting thing in the series. Here’s my problem though. She has a beginning and an end but the middle is still the same. So her beginning is changed in that she gets this wole new arc that basically is just a cut and paste of Mean Girls into the story. Then the movie just kind of cuts back to the comic without mentioning anything that happened before. Then the movie cuts back to get a final twist at the end. Its… weird and doesn’t really work for me.

Which basically sums up my feelings on the movie. It feels like a Frankenstein where they added parts but didn’t really think about what they added then kind of let the monster wander around until it was finally shot.

For example mother fucker is given a backstory where he actually killed his own mother accidentally. That’s good. But then we never see a scene that settles on the emotional trauma that would cause. That’s bad. Then he’s given a best friend who is killed by his criminal uncle. That’s interesting. Unfortunately this uncle is straight up never mentioned again so he feels like a throw away character. That’s dumb. Then at the end he’s killed which is weird but he gives this nice line about being famous which isn’t that well developed as far as motivation because I thought he was more about revenge and….That’s confusing.

This might sounds like a case of the “I liked the comic better” buts it’s not. In fact there was one part of the comic I thought should have been changed and thought they missed out in not changing it. Stars and Stripes still dies after one scene which is bizarre because we are supposed to care about the character. He really should have died after hitmans dad. That way we could have gotten to know the character. They could have developed a family bond, we could have connected him to the uncle character through their mafia roots. There was a lot to play with there but for some reason he still dies like at the beginning of the second act which just seems like a waste of a good character and a great actor.

All in all its pretty good but doesn’t feel cohesive. Take the end where they decide they can’t be superheros anymore. Why? I mean this would have made sense in the comic because they just got their asses handed to them by the police after a major terrorist event. But here its like, “Hey we just beat the bad guys, stopped them before they did anything bad and totally got away scott free. Guess we can’t do this anymore.”

I think the problem is that they wanted to add some things but didn’t really know what to do with the tone of the story. Like the diahera scene (you’ll know it when you see it) and mother russia ripping a door off its hinges, these all seem like scenes designed to make the universe more fun and “comic-booky”. But the problem is that the comic used scenes of violence to establish a tone which actually required a more “realistic” depiction of events. All in all the movie feels, hate to say it, campy. And disjointed.

Trust me, if you’ve read the comic, every time it switches from cannon to non cannon material you’ll feel the ‘thunk’ as the whole movie shifts.

Which is too bad because all in all I want to like the movie so much. After Millar’s comments I wanted this to come along and show him how to do it right but this doesn’t do that. Its got some great humor, some cool scenes and some great fucking ass acting so its not a waste of time. But if I wanted to staple Mean Girls to my copy of Kick Ass 2 I could do that for less than eight bucks.