Kick-Ass 2 Review - OR - Oedipus's Bloody Soul

Plot

After showing the world that superheroes aren’t necessarily fiction with his crime-fighting persona Kick-Ass, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and super ninja come bloodthirsty, foul-mouthed child-shaped WMD Mindy ‘Hit Girl’ Macready (Chloë Grace Moretz) are trying to lead normal lives. Sort of. The world is different place now however – with new heroes pouring from the woodwork, including aged avenger Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carey) – and one-time hero sidekick Chris Damicco (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has sworn super-villain vengeance for the death of his father.

This is how your brain punishes you if you eat too much cheese before beddy-byes.

Review

Kick-Ass 2 was always going to be fighting an uphill battle (possibly against an army of suited goons to the tune of some obscure 80s punk metal). The original Kick-Ass was a breath of fresh, rebellious, ultra-violent air; comic-book movies are so formulaic as to render the word redundant and Kick-Ass reveled in its unique sense of frenetic anarchy.

With both original director Matthew Vaughan and original writer Jane Goldman AWOL on the sequel, Kick-Ass 2 was dicing with the sharp repugnant edges of critical boo-hooing before it started: too similar and ‘boo, it’s a copy’; too different and ‘boo, it’s lost its identity.’

As it turns out, Kick-Ass 2 is neither of these extremes. And yet…boo, where’d the heart go?

For the first hour or so Kick-Ass 2 picks up so flawlessly from the be-jetpacked, Presley serenaded conclusion of its predecessor that the last 3 years feel like little-more than an extended ad-break, albeit still shorter than the arduous jingled vistas of an average afternoon on Comedy Central.

3 years have passed in the film universe as well and many and more loonies and outcasts across the broad and scary spectrum of society have come sprinting all bandy-legged and latexed into the world of superheroes. Swift removal of previous love interest Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca) aside, it’s business as usual for our returning heroes. Dave ‘Kick Ass’ Lizewski remains the affable everyman while Mindy ‘Hit Girl’ Macready is every bit the potty-mouthed, murderous, scene-stealer as before. Albeit less of a screen revolution. 

You could wax comedic about Chloe Grace Moretz...but she'd probably murder you where you stand. 

Jim Carey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes is the obvious Big Daddy surrogate figure here, but his influence is a mere drop in his predecessor’s ocean of eccentric weirdness. Carey has been quick to distance himself from the film on moral grounds, a move that could have proved immensely damaging had his character been given much to do. As it is he’s little more than a short-lived underused quirk to bring the bumbling Justice Forever group of assorted social oddities together.

Talking of said social oddities, Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison) with his anti-gravity baseball bat is endearingly goofy and effortlessly fun while new filly Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) is largely pointless eye-candy. All in all, the eclectic diversity of Justice Forever is measurable as both a narrative and a visual cacophony of mutual weirdos.

Everything that made the first film what it was – the violence, language, attitude, energy, soundtrack and general absurdities – are all present and accounted for, warped by the sequel lense that demands ‘bigger and better’…and so are therefore naturally just a little worse off, stretched beyond capacity rather than bulked up for the next level.

However, from the 2^nd act onwards, the tone shifts and what was once a comedic subversion of genre tropes painted in the blood of a thousand thugs to Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation becomes an unsettlingly intimate, tonally mismanaged affair. It’s only for a few sequences, but it’s enough to potentially sour the entire experience.

'So wait, my pay-cheque's banked already? Yeah, fuck this film.'

Watching the majestically ridiculous Mother Russia brutalise an entire street-full of suitably inept cops in an escalating orgy of creative bloodlust? Fantastic, more please. Watching two roid-head thugs assault and murder a defenseless elderly man? Um…not so much. Watching a group of equally dithering, absurdly costumed, loveable losers, loving life and fighting crime with all the clinical skill of a drunk toddler to the rousing cry of ‘The Saints Go Marching In’? Yes! That, that and more of that. Watching a helpless woman’s potential rape being played for a crass cock joke?...yuck. All of these scenes happen within 20 minutes of each other, sequencing amongst others, and may very well completely decimate the tone and enjoyment-factor of the film depending on your capacity for stomaching discomforting violence.

It’s a real and surprising shame. Kick-Ass (original and sequel) revels in ultra-violence, a glorious litany of luminous buckets of comic book crimson, broken bones, dismembered limbs and many and more ghastly delights. What made the first so uniquely and riotously enjoyable was it’s shameless and obviously comical treatment of screen violence without ever losing that sense of heart (Big Daddy…sob). And until that mid-point 20-minute period where the villains dive headlong into villainy, Kick-Ass 2was right on the same track. Quite why it all went wrong is up for debate – though the missing influences of Vaughan and Goldman certainly have something to do with it – but go wrong it does and despite the relative strength of the climactic warehouse blow-out (though it’s got nothing on the skyscraper jet-pack caper) Kick-Ass 2 struggles to recover from the ugly smear it leaves.

And yet, Kick-Ass 2 is an undeniably, shamelessly fun experience. It struggles to live up to its forerunner (as it was always going to) but juggles that delicate sequel balancing-act well: paying homage to its heritage while adding enough new strings to its military-grade bow. Case-in-point: Mindy’s struggling to handle the evils of High School Life, complete with a pop-music reference epic in unexpectedness. Most impressively, the film manages to recover from the loss of Mark Strong. Mintz-Plaase is a talented comedian, but his ability to pull off 'big-bad' was doubtful to say the least. Thankfully, in his oedipal reincarnation as The Motherfucker, he's zipped together a villain as childishly inept as he is crudely cruel.

This year's annual meeting of BDSM maniacs was going to be a big one.

Verdict

Less of a barnstorming success than before, but still successful in its own right. Repulsive sequences put aside (and an unwillingness to do so is understandable) Kick-Ass 2 has enough heart, soul, backbone and bloody giblets to support its own legacy, just ignore the critical panning and intellectual dong-comparisons.

4/5

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The Lone Ranger Review - OR - Buck-Buck-Buckaroo!

Plot

Native American Comanche Tonto (Johnny Depp) and sole-survivor of a brutal slaughter – come spirit-walker and legendary masked renegade for justice the Lone Ranger – John Reid (Armie Hammer) team-up to bring notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to justice. Naturally however, things aren’t quite as they seem. To the detriment of trains everywhere.

Hollister were really pushing the boat out with their newest models.

 Review

Sequels and adaptations…you can’t move for sequels and adaptations in modern cinema. The logic is sound (it’s a hell of a lot easier to make that all important profit) but some are perplexingly pointless: Percy Jackson 2? Total Recall remake? However, with its radio show, comic books, TV show and everything else you dig up over a 70-year history, The Lone Ranger was begging for the modern Hollywood treatment. Not that Hollywood has done well on the Western front in recent history – Wild, Wild, West and Cowboys & Aliens…oops – but it was a similar situation with those scurvy dogs on the seven seas until Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp came along.

Now they’re teaming up again, hoping lightening can strike twice with The Lone Ranger.

Well…at least it’s no Wild, Wild, West.

Complete with comedy side-kick horse. We need more of those in the world.

Outside of the omnipresent grimmer-than-a-public-toilet light filter that depresses the entire production, The Lone Ranger is something of a visual feast. The hats, boots, costumes and doodads are all present and accounted for and, thanks to the few characters that flirt with vibrancy, Ranger is as aesthetically coherent as it is visually engaging. How much is on-location and how much is green-screen is up for debate, but at least all those desert vistas look appropriately vista-ry.

For a film like The Lone Ranger, where you’re tussling with seven decades of collective nostalgia, the treatment of the characters is something akin to a game of Operation, but instead of setting the light off when you mess up you murder someone’s childhood. Johnny Depp as Tonto is back boots-and-all into the role of Captain Jack, albeit with a different costume and accent. And make no mistake, he’s still entertaining - all  wide-eyes, goofy charm, gurning ways and flailing limbs - but the Captain Jack shtick has gone too far now (it’d gone too far by the end of the Piratestrilogy) and Tonto is just the eponymous dead cow back on the flogger (that’s a thing right, the place of flogging?). He’s even colour coordinated.

The sense of villainy is also far too vague and indistinct to matter. When 11 out of 10 men are greasy and bearded across the broad range of ‘brown to grey’ it’s hard to tell quite who’s who. Not to mention quite hard to care.

Captain Jack Sparrow took unemployment hard.

When The Lone Ranger feels like it however, it can be the most entertaining film of the year. Depp is as capable as ever as the enigmatic weirdo (déjà vu aside), Armie Hammer holds up surprisingly well as the inept-come-mythological hero, the music canters along with an irresistible joviality and the action is as good as anything else yet seen in this blow-out of a summer; all jocular quips, slapstick clashes and visceral comedy. Rangertreats trains the same as too many films this year have treated skyscrapers: like Lego. Working on a smaller scale has allowed Ranger to both distance itself from the apocalyptic mediocrity and create tight, tense and ludicrously OTT action sequences. And we can all enjoy that.

It’s ultimately half an hour plus too long. The climactic train-robbing blow-out is an absolute hoot, the pinnacle of blockbuster (or should that be ‘Bruckheimer’) entertainment that tears by to the tune of that timeless riff of Rossini’s William Tell Overture – you know the one – but there’s a definite sense of lethargy by the time it comes chugging along. When the film isn’t blowing up dust or engaging in remarkably bloodless violence it feels much like how horse travel itself must have felt back in those days: repetitive, largely bereft of anything more interesting than a cactus and very likely to give you a rash somewhere.

Of the many franchises this year - new and old, sequels and start-ups - The Lone Ranger would arguably best benefit from a good sequeling (Stateside money woes aside). It so nearly threatens to be so good but frequently, almost purposefully shoots itself in the foot. For every legitimately interesting character – Bonham Carter’s underused sassy brothel owner Red Harrington - there’s roughly a billion identikit grizzled men. For every fast, furious and exciting sequence, there’s a drudgerous exchange that adds little to the characters and less to the story. The framing device, where an old(er) Tonto regales a young pretender with stories of his adventures, is entirely superfluous and actively pace-breaking. With seven decades of source material to work with – and the industrial clout of Disney behind it – there’s more than enough scope for a barnstorming Lone Ranger film, the sort that this particular canter only pretends to be.

You can tell he's a bad guy because of all the ugly.

 Verdict

Quite where its Stateside failures have come from (financially and critically) is hard to tell. The Lone Ranger is by no means perfect and has a swag bag of miss-steps, but it’s still an endearing and entertaining Western romp, one of those rare films that’ll paste a smile across your face.

3/5

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Only God Forgives Review - Or - Godlywood

Plot

Exiled American Julian Thompson (Ryan Gosling) is the proprietor of a Bangkok fighting club that masquerades as a cover for his family’s drug distribution business. After his brother Billy (Tom Burke) is killed in revenge for murdering a prostitute, Julian’s mother Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas) flies in to the country to oversee her family’s own vengeance. However, the murders have also drawn the attention of police chief Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) who deals justice with a supernatural proficiency.

There's red in these pictures. There's red everywhere. Red

Review

Enigma is a powerful tool, but it can also be an actively distancing one if over or misused. While Only God Forgives tells you next-to-nothing time and again, with the contextual validity of every scene and shot questionable and contentious, it still remains utterly engrossing. Perplexingly so. The only thing sparser than dialogue from start to finish is the fuzzy warmth of human affection: scenes linger languidly; shots bare on for what should be discomfortingly long periods of time; images smash edit into one another with little reason and less explanation. The entire production is an aesthetically dichotomous trip-out seemingly designed exclusively to bemuse, confuse and even bore.

And yet it’s utterly entrancing.

It was described by early patrons at Cannes as equal parts vapid and pretentiously self-indulgent on director Nicholas Winding Refn’s part and it has to be said that Only God Forgives – like 2001: A Space Odyssey and many others before it – is one of those films where complete despondency from an audience is understandable. Whereas Drive was a vehicle for Ryan Gosling’s silent charms, here he is a simple brooding accessory to Winding Refn’s unyieldingly exclusionary and yet visually and symbolically engorged filmmaking sensibility. It’s a style that will understandably exhaust and tire many – as indeed happened with Drive – but for those who swallow it whole with eyes and mind left unguarded it’ll leave you delirious in its wake.

Winding Refn’s style can be painstakingly slow and Only God Forgives marks the evolution of that. Characters frequently stare into very little or nothing at all and this coupled with the equal parts vibrant and unsettling cinematographic stylings of Larry Smith – here drowning the film in contrasting primary colour washes and neon evanescence – makes for an experience as narratively ambiguous as it is visually overwhelming.

Red like violence or red like the passion of dance?

Dealing unflinchingly with the issues of masculinity, guilt and consciousness, Only God Forgives holds no punches in its exploration of one man’s entirely abstruse and quite possible literal purgatory. Not forgetting sexual suppression and depravity, that old stickler, never before better lighted or more stylishly presented. As odd a notion as that may seem.

Only God Forgives drips in artistic flourish as much as it does the blood and gore of ultra-violence. ‘Stylish’ will doubtlessly becomes synonymous with the film as stylish it undoubtedly is, fusing exotic lighting with stubbornly unconventional use of the camera to present the film like some foreign fruit, as indeed the sultry backdrop of Bangkok will be to many. And therein lies it’s potential downfall; if for even a second you slip out of Winding Refn’s trippy spell or lose track of the escalating intertwined symbolism, it’ll all seem utterly pointless. And indeed superficial and thematically pretentious.

Only God Forgives experiments with its audience as much as it does the technical tenets of filmmaking.

In much the same way that the film’s technical and narrative merits depend entirely on the individual’s willingness to accept them, so does Ryan Gosling’s performance. He’s done the silent, hard-man shtick before (he effectively wrote the book on it in Drive) but here he’s so silent and so sculpted as to seem positively wooden. Is he even acting? It’s a question that’s – rightfully – already been asked. He spends so much of the runtime staring mostly blank-eyed and stone-faced that to the passer-by or equally ostricised viewer, he may very well be doing nothing at all.

Red like...like...like sex or something. Symbolism, guys.

He also isn’t even the go-to silent warrior this time around. That honour belongs to the exhilarating Vithaya Pansringarm as Chang: a potentially supernatural force of brutal justice – an angel of death – seemingly able to conjure a katana out of nowhere, whose every look, glance and action oozes a sense of unrepentant malevolence and undeniable power.

If Only God Forgives appeals exclusively on the allure of Gosling alone then it may not be the film for you, both if you find his performance entirely lacking and if you believe it belies a more complicated brooding intensity, drowning in the neon symbolism that so characterises the entire production. The real acting heavy-duty is dealt by the captivating Kristen Scott-Thomas who, as Julian’s mother Crystal, provides arguably the sternest psychological test for both her son and the audience, challenging him physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually in an escalating, yet ever muted and symbolically subdued, conflict that invariably ends in violence. Depending on where you fall in regards to accepting Only God Forgives’ languorous ways, the mid-way dinner sequence involving mother & son will either be yet another under-acted, poorly paced and pointless scene or a master class in the subtleties of psychological conflict and tension.

Theirs is a battle of minds, whereas the rest is a storm of fists, blades and blood.

Only God Forgives couldn’t be less a ‘film for everyone.’ The violence is extreme (including a torture scene that puts Saw to shame), absolutely nothing is explicit, characters are ceaselessly ambiguous, narrative beats are indolently slow and the entire production drowns in both heavy-handed and ethereally vague symbolism. And yet it’s also stylistically extraordinary, with a pitch-perfect synthed soundtrack and, for those in the appropriate state of mind, filled with intensely fascinating characters that clash and bleed together in a plot as infinitely interpretable as the concept that drives it.

BLUE! Oh yeah there's blue too. Red versus blue. Symbolism is so...symbolic.

Verdict

Stylish, violent, perplexing, exciting, disgusting and thought provoking in equal measure. Depending on your appetite for the vague and understated, it’ll feel like either cinematic heaven or hell.

5/5

The trailer moves quickly, the film doesn't. Be warned:

You see that little button down there, it's kind of blue and says 'like'? It's really fun to click, honest it is. Apparently, if you enjoy reading something and click on it magical things happen. Guess there's only one way to find out...

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