The scene is pretty much a warning shot across the brows of anyone getting ready to tut-tut the spectacle of kids with guns cracking jokes. Having had enough, he yells, “Don’t! Not cool.” “Okay,” she replies and then, as he’s walking away, cavalierly shoots him in the back, and giggles. She shoots him, and he falls back - stunned, but alive, thanks to the vest.
Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is testing out a new bulletproof vest. Hit Girl (Chloë Grace-Moretz), who, with our hero Dave Lizewski, a.k.a.
NIGHT BITCH KICK ASS 2 MOVIE
The new movie opens on a young girl pointing a giant gun: This is 15-year-old Mindy Macready, a.k.a. Believe it or not, Kick-Ass 2 is even more of a provocation than the first Kick-Ass. Other than perhaps as a kind of touchstone for coming to terms with my own response to Kick-Ass 2, a movie that, for all its predictable sequel-ness, manages to conjure up pretty much the same dark magic that the earlier film did, albeit with more troubling results. This apprehension has reached all the way to one of the stars of the new film - Jim Carrey, who, post-Newtown, has decided not to promote it. But it is a culture that, for some good reasons, is more sensitive about such things. But it was not before the massacres in Columbine, Virginia Tech, and elsewhere Kick-Ass 2 isn’t being released into a culture any more or less violent than the one that received the first Kick-Ass. Of course, that was before the massacres in Tucson, and Aurora, and Newtown. Still, if you could accept its unholy crossing of the pop-culture streams, Kick-Ass worked as a kind of mad teen opera - taking you to some truly dark places in a way that the average superhero flick never dared. Crossing grotesque violence with broad, goofy humor, and a corrosive journey of moral damnation with a standard-issue coming-of-age tale, it seemed like the last word in ironic cynicism. For many viewers, Matthew Vaughn’s 2010 adaptation of Mark Millar’s aspirant teen superhero comic book Kick-Ass was a kind of litmus test for nihilism.