KICK ASS 2: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

KICK ASS 2 (Dir. Jeff Wadlow, 2013)

It’s been three years since Matthew Vaughn’s super hero action comedy KICK ASS, but Jeff Wadlow, taking over the sequel as director, duplicates the look and tone of the original so faithfully that it feels like it’s only a few months later in the lives of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz as “Kick-Ass” and “Hit-Girl” respectively.

These, of course, are their super hero names, but their characters' real names aren’t that important so let’s move on. Although Taylor-Johnson is 23, he can still pull off the shaggy awkward demeanor of a high school student. It doesn’t matter that in the meantime he’s played an ultra-hip drug dealer for Oliver Stone in SAVAGES, or Count Vronsky in Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA, here he’s convincingly that conflicted kid again.

Mainly because of her tininess, Moretz (now 16) doesn’t look like she’s gotten older either. Moretz’s confidence does get beaten down a bit, as she deals with the ins and outs of high school popularity and an overprotective godfather, Marcus Chestnut as her dead father’s former police partner, but she’s still got plenty of that stuff that Lou Grant hated. Spunk, I think it’s called.

As they set up at the end of the first film, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (you know, McLovin!) is set on avenging the death of his father, and being a mobster’s kid he is in the financial position to create a new alter ego, which he calls The Mother Fucker, and hire tons of goons to do his dirty work as he isn’t in the physical position to carry it off himself.

While Moretz retires her purple tights, Taylor-Johnson joins a group of likewise-minded vigilantes called “Justice Forever,” headed by Jim Carrey as camouflaged Christian/former mafia enforcer who calls himself “Colonel Stars and Stripes.” Carrey is here to fill in the superstar space left by Nicholas Cage, who played Hit-Girl’s dad in the previous one, but despite a showcase scene in which he leads the ragtag costumed community into crashing a poker game of a bunch of Chinese sex traffickers, he isn’t given much to do.

Wadlow’s screenplay keeps the jokes coming, mostly as one-liner asides, but a lot of them failed to make me laugh out loud. A running gag about Mintz-Plasse assigning super villain names to his hired hands, such as “Black Death” and “Genghis Carnage,” got a few chuckles out of me from the offended reactions of John Leguizamo as his assistant: “Isn’t that a little bit incredibly racist?”

Clark Duke, returning as one of Taylor-Johnson’s best buds who adopts a super hero persona named “Battle Guy, was also amusing here and there, but like Carrey, he’s seriously underutilized too.

After a bunch of set-up sequences, some of which involve inspirational speeches, with the theme being “this is who you really are!” and the killing off of just the exact people you think will be killed off, the movie attempts its climatic pay-off: a warehouse battle between the good and evil armies, with Moretz having it out with Olga Kurkulina as the muscular Mother Russia, while Taylor-Johnson and Mintz Plasse fight on the rooftop above.

KICK-ASS 2 works overtime to top the first one, but the result is massive overkill instead of fun entertainment. It beats what few ideas it has into the ground, and its strewn with underdeveloped characters, like Lindy Booth as Kick-Ass’s new love interest, who goes by the moniker “Night Bitch.” Seems she’s just there to have somebody that Mintz Plasse can threaten to get to our hero, but that unfortunately amounts to some horribly misguided rape jokes.

A story-thread borrowed from HEATHERS, has Moretz getting back at a clique of popular high school girls, headed by Claudia Lee, that dissed her, by way of having a football player pull a “ditch date” on her in front of everybody! The bitches! Moretz’s revenge consists of projectile-vomiting and projectile-diarrhea so there’s that element of gross-out humor for you.

Only if you’re a huge fan of the first KICK-ASS, should you race to the theater to see this sequel. It has ‘wait for video’ written all over it.



Maybe it’s that the fatigue that’s formed over years of super hero movies, and that the freshness of the formula has long worn off, making this seem about as innovative in the ‘let’s try to satirize the genre’ game as that failed Seth Rogen GREEN HORNET flick from a few years back, but, however you slice it, KICK-ASS 2 is nowhere near as charming or funny as its predecessor. But worse, its shock value is worthless.

 

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ANNA KARENINA: The Film Babble Blog Review

   

Now showing in the Triangle area at the Rialto Theatre in Raleigh, at the Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill, and in Durham at the Carolina Theatre:

ANNA KARENINA (Dir. Joe Wright, 2012)

I have to say upfront that I am “Anna Karenina”-illerate. 



I have never read Leo Tolstoy’s 1868 novel, nor have I seen any of the 1,056 TV and movie adaptations (I think this is an accurate number; I’m too lazy to confirm it on IMDb or Wikipedia). All I knew going in was the basic premise, and that this is the third in director Wright and Keira Knightly’s “literary trilogy” (previous installments were 2005’s PRIDE AND PREDJUDICE, and 2007’s ATONEMENT).

Wright’s new adaptation of ANNA KARENINA largely sets the tale of a love triangle that ripples through Moscow’s high society in a lavish old theater that evolves within the production into whatever backdrop is needed. The effect is mesmerizing in the choreography of the players, and the camera work that includes several stunning unbroken shots - at least I think they were unbroken, some cuts may have been invisible to my eye.

So Keira Knight, as the title character, works around the ropes, pulleys, curtains, footlights, and appropriate props, to portray a virtuous woman in a loveless marriage to Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin (a balding, bearded, and quite boring Jude Law). Knight meets Aaron Taylor-Johnson (KICK ASS, John Lennon in NOWHERE BOY) as the dashing Count Vronsky, and they begin an affair together.

In a secondary storyline, Domhnall Gleeson as Konstantin Levin, retreats to working along with the peasants after his marriage proposal was rejected by the young blond beauty Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who gets involved with Taylor-Johnson. You see, it’s complicated.

Obviously, since this is a 2 hour and 10 minute adaptation (written by legendary screenwriter/playwright Tom Stoppard), of a 864 page book, the movie has to gloss over a lot of story details, but the last half of the film got a bit too jumbled for me narratively. It was also got harder and harder to be immersed in these people’s lives, as Knightly goes a bit over the top at times, Law is overly-passionless, and Taylor-Johnson’s pretty boy pose mostly just blends into the scenery.

However, overall the film casts a pleasing spell with its intriguing theatrical framework even though that concept gets dropped for a bit in the middle of film. A ballroom dance sequence is one of the most striking, though I’d be hard pressed to name that arm movement dance they’re doing. Background dancing couples freeze as the principals pass, with the exquisite choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui again coming into play. It’s an incredibly inventive way to tackle one of the most standard scenes in all of historical romance drama.

A horse race scene comes close, but I’m not even going to try to describe how they pull that off.

Maybe if I was as in love with the aching close-ups of Knightly as cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s camera is, I would be into the poetry of these people’s plight, but really caring about how this woman is shunned by the aristocracy was really beyond me. 

Still, ANNA KARENINA has considerable merits, and folks who have a history with this material will surely get a lot out of it. It does make me want to read the book, and maybe check out another adaptation (I hear the 2000 miniseries is good), so I consider it a success for introducing me to one of Tolstoy’s most loved works, and for its meta theatrical take on this oft-told tale.

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