Kick-Ass wasn't too bad. I'm referring to the film and the comic. Both took an honest and darkly funny look at the logistics of a superhero in our reality, and both did a pretty good job of it. They diverged paths a bit - the film injected a little bit of Hollywood heart where the comic was content to keep everything dark and ugly, but that just comes down to your personal preference. The problem both had though was that they stretched the reality of the situation just a bit too far. I bought it, but at the back of my head I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that the whole thing was coming dangerously close to imploding on itself. Because superheroes can't exist. A guy doing shit like this would be dead in a day - something the movie states itself. So how can the stakes possibly be raised for Kick-Ass 2? Well, they can't really. But the movie tries, and therein lies the problem: it tries to be more realistic, it tries to be more sensational, it tries to be more serious and it tries to be more funny. And it succeeds at none of them. A scene where a teenage trained killer is brought to her knees by high-school bullying is followed by a scene where she gets revenge by making a chick projectile shit across a cafeteria floor. Get me the fuck out of here.
Where Kick-Ass asked the question, "What would happen if superheroes really existed?", Kick-Ass 2 follows that up with, "What about a supervillain?" McLovin, still upset about his dad being launched out of a high-rise by a rocket launcher, desperately wants to destroy Kick-Ass and everything that he loves, but unfortunately lacks the physical strength and attention span to take care of that himself. So he uses his enormous wealth to amass a team of professional psychotics and serial killers from around the world to do it for him. Meanwhile, at the Hall of the Super Best Friends, the events of the first film have inspired a city to put on lycra and be idiots too, and Kick-Ass finds himself involved with a team of superheroes, featuring among them an ex-mafia goon, two parents hoping their exposure can get them some information on their missing son and Kick-Ass's best friend. Yep, these nice guys are going to go up against some of the world's most well-trained, cold-blooded killers. MEANWHILE, AT THE...SOMEWHERE ELSE, following the death of her father, Hit Girl has promised her new adoptive dad that she's done with her butterfly-knife twirling ways and she's going to be a normal teenager. An easy enough task, if it weren't for the fact that one high-school girl contains more venom and evil than any entire mob organisation. Hit Girl quickly finds herself way out of her depth, and unable to shake the feeling that she's just running from the person she really is. Somehow these three separate, bloated and unfocused storylines blindly stumble into one another for the film's climax and I then got to go home.
I'm going to be one of those people that roll their eyes, take a big self-important pause and say, "The book was so much better." Here's the thing, though: I didn't really like the comic, either. But they both try to accomplish the same thing, and the comic did a much better job of it. Because basically, what's the realistic representation of a supervillain? Evil. Pure evil. The comic takes that idea and flies off with it into the stratosphere, jumping headfirst into incredibly dark waters with a manic grin. The movie takes that idea and dips its toes in before deciding it's too cold, diving headfirst into the much more comfortable spa instead. Let's run a quick checklist. In the movie, Fogell robs a shop owner because he wants to go viral with the security footage. In the comic, he murders him. In the movie, when his team kill a hero, one of them asks whether she should also kill the dog locked up in a cage, to which Fogell replies, "Jesus Christ, I'm not that evil!" In the comic, he shoots the dog because it's the only living thing in the room he has any power over, and its head is fixed to the hero's body. In the movie, the supervillain team murder a bunch of police while Fogell beats and attempts to rape Kick-Ass's girlfriend, failing to because he can't get an erection (funny stuff!). In the comic, he asks for directions from a group of children before gunning them down, shoots everyone he sees on the streets, kills Katie's parents and rapes Katie, while his team massacre more people in the neighborhood and all police that appear. I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying it delivers the message effectively. If the filmmakers were afraid to go this far, they shouldn't have even started down the path.
The other big problem Kick-Ass 2 has is that it suffers the reality implosion I was talking about earlier. The comic does too, but as I've already established, it knew that from the beginning and adopted a totally different tone to compensate. The film tries to have its cake and eat it too. I found myself wondering the entire movie why McLovin didn't just get one of or all of his supervillains to find Kick-Ass and shoot him in the head. Or why, when the final battle did come about, his supervillains didn't just gun down the melee-wielding heroes. I didn't have these problems with the comic, because it threw reality out the door from the first panel, allowing sensational, disgustingly sick evil to reign in its stead. The film still desperately clings to reality, and thinks the turn of events can remain the same in the process. Another example comes about two thirds of the way through the film. Kick-Ass's dad claims to be Kick-Ass so his son doesn't get arrested. McLovin finds out his identity and has his dad beaten and hanged in his jail cell, sending a picture of the murder to his phone. Kick-Ass breaks down - he can't even find the words to tell his friend what he's looking at - and drops to his knees, sobbing. Within ten minutes of that, he's dressed in his super-suit along with all of his super buddies fighting Fogell and all of his super buddies, cracking jokes and throwing punches with all of the confidence in the world. There's no consequences to anything in this film, it's just a set of schizoprhenic moments. Within ten minutes he forgets all about the brutal, cold-blooded murder of his father because the movie doesn't know what it wants you to feel. So feel everything, but do it quickly!
I'm not completely negative about this flick, though. At it's core, I did enjoy it, with all of its flaws. I really appreciated Hit-Girl's narrative arc; it was a genius idea having a trained killer face the unfathomable horrors of high school. There's an amazing scene that follows her being victim to a brutal prank, one that leaves her, for all of her mental and physical strength, crying helplessly at the foot of Kick-Ass's bed. He embraces her and tells her how in awe of her resolve he always is. The person I saw the flick with leaned over to me and said, "Ah fuck, I hope they don't kiss." I replied, "They won't. Their relationship is stronger than that." Because it is. They need each other on a much deeper level than a Hollywood romance. They are both, in different ways, a father to each other. And then the movie ends with them kissing. Goddamnit. My favourite part of Kick-Ass 2 was the cheesy family photo of Nic Cage that hangs in Hit-Girl's gym. He struck the perfect balance of reality and sensationalism the first movie went for - he was a loving father trying to raise his daughter the best way he saw how: teaching her how to slaughter criminals. It's an approach the filmmakers could have either doubled down on for the sequel, or thrown right out the door. They could have had heart shine through the darkness, or good engulfed by evil in its purest, most maniacal form. Instead they tried to have both, got neither and lost everything. But nobody will notice if there's a diarrhea joke, right? Right?
About 90 seconds into Now You See Me, I leaned over to the person I was watching it with and said, "I hate this already." No, hear me out. Jesse Eisenberg was playing Jesse Eisenberg, standing in the middle of the street performing a card trick to a large group of people. His ability to talk like a tommy-gun translates well to playing a magician, as a large part of a magic act is being able to charm the audience so as to control them. As the cameraman refuses to sit still, swooping and ducking and weaving like an amped-up four year old, Jesse Eisenberg tells a pretty girl to pick a card. He spreads the deck out and asks the pretty girl if she can see her card. She cannot. "That's because you're looking too closely. And what have I been telling you all night? The closer you look..." Right on cue, the crowd shouts back, "THE LESS YOU SEE!" as the camera swoops up into the air and the lights on a skyscraper reveal the 7 of hearts or whatever the fuck it was. The crowd goes nuts. Jesse Eisenberg sneers and pimps away. Was it even her card? Doesn't matter. Was I not supposed to think this was a very basic magic trick in which he had already gotten an electrician to set the reveal up and just used suggestive gestures to get the pretty girl thinking of the 7 of hearts? Doesn't matter. As far as the movie was concerned, in 90 seconds it had just shattered my brain. It's a dangerous line you walk when you think you're smarter than your audience. It's even more dangerous when you're a fucking moron.
Now You See Me has actors playing characters, but their character's names are just a necessary formality. This movie is about Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Mini James Franco, four people who work in magic brought together by an unknown magic mastermind who gives them the tools to perform a trick in which they stand in Las Vegas and rob a bank in Paris. Money rains down on the crowd, the camera swoops across financial benefactor Michael Caine and The Four Horsemen's stupid smug faces and I guess I'm supposed to be mesmerised. Enter Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent, two clashing-head cops brought together to solve the whodunit and fall in love. They enlist the help of Morgan Freeman, a cynic who makes a living ruining magic on television, but darn it all, he just can't crack how these kids keep stealing shit. It's almost as if it's...magic? Or he's just as fucking stupid as everyone else in this movie.
One of the most effective tools a magician has is reality. The amazing thing about actually bearing witness to a magic trick is that you know it can't be real, because magic isn't real, and yet you can't deny you just saw the magician who's been in the tank of water for the last three minutes spit out the exact same card the dude in the audience signed and gave to other magician. You're left in total awe, wondering how they did it, because your mind is unable to resolve what just happened. Do you want to know how they did it in Now You See Me? IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. The first big trick The Four Horsemen perform is the aforementioned bank heist. What I didn't mention was that they sent a man through space and time to the vault in Paris. So much of the scene is devoted to him hopping in the gigantic device they have on stage, strapping on the cheapest, goofiest looking piece of headgear I've seen in a big budget production and vanishing when the device compresses and closes on him. It's insult to injury when the CGI is so painfully obvious. It's even worse when Morgan Freeman says "Oh no no no, they didn't really transport him. It was an illusion!" No. Fucking. Shit.
The difference between Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve was that in Ocean's Eleven, you were in on the joke. You got to bomb along with The Super Rich Friends Club as they tricked and stole from Not So Rich Andy Garcia, laughing at how silly and poor he was. In Ocean's Twelve, The Super Rich Friends Club was laughing at you. The whole movie was an experiment in how much the audience can be told "Look at how much smarter than you I am", as if for some cosmic reason, that's why people go to the movies. I don't know about you, but I go to the movies to be given a few obvious puzzle pieces concealed well enough that when I put them together I feel clever. I don't go to the movies to be told, "We were going to steal this, but then we decided not to, but then this guy said he was going to, so we decided we were going to again, and then we stole it by making him think we stole it when we actually didn't, but while he was thinking that we didn't steal it, we stole it. Except we didn't. You dickhead." Can you guess which of the two I think Now You See Me is? Towards the end of the film, The Four Horseman start pulling off increasingly-escalating feats that are supposed to seem almost superhuman, and during the film's climax, everything they did is explained with smug dialogue and swooping camera angles. I'd have been piecing together my blown-apart mind if I hadn't long before been saying things like, "Well, that was a mirror" and "Yeah, they used a body-double like they did in that earlier trick" and "I get it. I fucking get it. If I say you're super duper smart, will you just end and leave me alone?"
The only characters in Now You See Me I felt anything other than blind hatred for were Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent. Ruffalo spends almost the entire movie becoming increasingly infuriated with the self-indulgent, elitist fuckheads he's surrounded by, that can't do anything other than say how much smarter than him they are. He's almost driven to violence more than once, and even begins doubting Melanie Laurent's loyalties, when she's the only other person in this smarmy universe that isn't an asshole. Honestly, the biggest mystery in this film is how he managed his self-control long enough to not just shoot Jesse Eisenberg in the face and say, "THERE. NO MORE MAGIC. PROBLEM SOLVED. FUCK OFF." I genuinely felt for him. At least, I did, until it's revealed in the last five minutes that he was the unknown magic mastermind who brought The Four Horsemen together so that he could get revenge on Morgan Freeman for driving his father to magic-induced suicide after he debunked one of his best tricks. ...What? Congratulations, Now You See Me, you finally got me. Though it wasn't because it was a twist I should have been able to see coming but didn't, or because all of the pieces were there in front of me, so I got a double whammy of being blown away by the revelation and feeling smart because I could then see exactly how it came to be. No, it was because it was a twist that made absolutely no fucking sense at all. It turns out Mark Ruffalo's an uppity cunt like the rest of them. I don't know, if you like sitting down and having a dumb person tell you how dumb you are for two hours, then Now You See Me will rock your world. Me, I'm going to go watch some Penn & Teller.
