Kick-Ass 2 (2013) dir: Jeff Wadlow

I loved Kick-Ass (see my original Kick-Ass write up!) and thought it truly great.

Or to put it in perspective: my wife hates comic book movies.  Her verdicts:

The Dark Knight: “Boring.” She’s watched it three times, but only the first 10 minutes on each occasion.

Watchman: “Fuck off.  It’s a little boys film.”

Spider-man 2:  Fell asleep. I remember this was on my birthday – a day when I can choose to do anything (it’s my BIRTHDAY for CHRISSAKE!) We went to see it after 3 hours of arguing about my choice.

Avengers Assemble? Don’t even go there…she’d been ruined by the first two Hulk movies.

And she is not at all keen on extreme movie violence either.

Double whammy.  So I dragged her kicking and screaming to see the original Kick-Ass . At the end of the movie, as the credits rolled, she turned to me and said: “I’d see that again”.

And we have. Loads! So she was dead keen to see the sequel as well! Hurrah!

I know Kick-Ass 2 has had some shoddy reviews but that doesn’t always reflect the enjoyment that you can get from watching a movie. So…

Dave (Kick-Ass) and Mindy (Hit-Girl) are now at high school, Chris (Red-Mist) wants revenge on Kick-Ass for the death of his Dad in Kick-Ass the Original and to become the worlds first super-villain. Dave wants to train to be a real superhero, Mindy decides to quit as Hit-Girl and to become accepted amongst her bitchy high school peers, so Dave/Kick-Ass teams up with some other superheroes.

It all goes pear-shaped. As does the film.

First 30 minutes in and I’m wondering… what the fuck has happened? Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Chloë Grace Moretz. Christopher Mintz-Plasse. All great actors. But they’re delivering lines flat and gurning away in their close-ups – they’re just…bad. Did the director not turn up, just go home early or what? I found it painful to watch.  Thank heavens for John Leguizamo and Morris Chestnut in their roles.

Then Colonel Star & Stripes (Jim Carey) arrives. We start to get a few good lines, however now we’re getting some odd edits and the fight scenes are choppy.  But at least the movie is finally becoming entertaining – super villain side-kick Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina) makes use of a lawnmower in a pretty novel way – and the story is picking up… and it stays “entertaining” all the way to the end.

Hell there is even a particularly nice action sequence with Hit Girl atop a moving  van as she’s being shot at.  She clambers all over it as it speeds along (what looks like very British countryside) and takes out the bad guys – knocking them under and over the other traffic . Unfortunately it didn’t half remind me of the good (or bad) days of the Sir Roger Moore James Bond movies:  great action, brilliant stunt work, nice humour, cut to actor – shit fake background – sequence ruined.

And I think that is the problem. It’s a fake Kick-Ass movie. Pretending to be Kick-Ass the Original. Photocopying all that was great about the Kick-Ass the Original but really only a faded and skewiff two dimensional Xerox.

So ultimately “entertaining” but a major disappointment.  My wife agrees.

I wonder if they’ll let me direct Kick-Ass 3?

Advertisement

A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) dir: John Moore

A friend worked on this movie. He overheard this conversation between the Producer and the Studio:

Producer : Yeah we’re making this action movie with Jai Courtney. It’s got huge explosions, and you wouldn’t believe the amount of cars we destroy. It’s cool. Really cool. The director’s really great at blowing shit up! Looks fabulous.

Studio: (a long pause) ……Jai who?

Producer: Er…Jai Courtney a great Australian actor!

Studio:  We’re talking about the same movie right?

Producer:  Er…

Studio: The movie we’ve given you 150…million…dollars…for… to shoot in Eastern Europe?

Producer:  Er…

Studio: I think we have a problem.

Producer: (thinking on his feet)  Trust me – it’s GRrrrrreat!…. But I can see where you’re going with this.  Tell ya what….give me another $25 miilion and I’ll ask Bruce to come on over. It’ll be a blast.

Studio:  Bruce Willis? Hmmm…Tricky…Very tricky.

Producer: Look we’ll change the title of the movie! Make it .. ‘Eat shit and Die Hard’ or something.

Studio: Hmm. Die Hard 5. I like it. I like it alot.  But…..What about the script?  You’ve shot most of the movie already!!!

Producer: No problemo! Bruce is GREAT. He’ll make up some shit on the spot.  No one will know the difference. Audiences today are stupid 5 year olds. They don’t care about stuff like that. Blow shit up! Flip cars! Michael Bay does it all the time and  look at the huge amount of money he makes.

Studio: You have a point there.

Producer: My mate Geoff is here. He’s bald. I can drop him into all the 2^nd unit shots we’re going to do in Moscow until  Brucey boy arrives.  Anything else we’ll just stick Brucey in front of a green screen and have him stare or smirk.  Then cut him into the action. He doesn’t even have to get off his own couch.

Studio: What about the villain? Die Hard movies have to have a great villain.

Producer: Way ahead of you there. After all, what do you pay me for? We’ve shot stuff with one villain but I’ll get another. Two for the price of one. And we”ll use them less, but make ’em speak Russian – they’ll appear serious and scary and intelligent and… and… and… Anyway all that good actory stuff.  All at the same time.  But we’ll give them less screen time. …Less is more. What do you say? It’ll be GRrrrrrreat!  Humungous box office moola!

Studio: You know I think this might work.

Producer:  Here’s my bank account details.

Prometheus (2012) dir: Ridley Scott

(Alien + Aliens) – (Alien3RC – Alien4 – AvP – AvPR) = – Prometheus

That’s really all I can say…

Serial Lover (1998) dir: James Huth

OK. Bit of a rule breaker here. This is an old film, so I’m not going to do this often. But it was great! And you won’t have heard of it. And I’ve got a bit of time on my hands (but that’s another story).

Picture the scene:

I had to get up really early on a cold Saturday October morning to go to a seminar. It was heaving down with rain and I was grumpy. So me and these 5 other people sat down in this huge empty auditorium – 9.00am – in these uncomfortable metal chairs. The kind that are always dug out from the room marked ‘Pain’ at these sort of events. Then an announcement comes on: “Before the seminar we’d like to show you this French film.”

“God noooooo!” I’m thinking. “I’m just not in the mood for some arty farty boring subtitled film.”

(I was a bit of an idiot in those days when it came to subtitles and foreign language films. And I had no hot chocolate on me to soothe my sorrows.)

What’s more the film didn’t start off too hot neither.

35ish Claire (Michèle Laroque) has decided she needs to settle down and get married, but she’s single. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her biological clock is ticking.

This didn’t sound like a good setup, I knew where this was going: it was a one way trip to La Boredom. But it’s shot nicely so I’ll hang in there.

But then Claire has three male friends and she’s going to pick one to marry.

I’m shuffling in my bum-numbing seat and thinking about blowing the seminar entirely. God it’s cold in here.

So she invites them over for dinner and…

…accidentally kills them all – one by one – in entirely believable and ingenious ways.

This was now laugh out loud black comedy.  Coen brothers territory but funnier. All six of us in the audience are trying not to choke.

And it just got funnier:

After she’s killed two of her friends, and failed to hide the bodies properly, her last remaining friend discovers whats been occurring and panics. He shuts himself in her bedroom, and pushes the end of a bookcase against the door. Maybe he can save himself from this apparently deranged and psychotic woman?

He sits down, and leans back against the other end of the bookcase to keep the door from opening.

She’s banging on the door “It was an accident! I didn’t mean to kill them!…. Both times!” Or words to that affect (and in French).  I can’t remember exactly.

On top of the bookcase is an ice-skate.

Claire’s banging on the door, blokey is on the floor freaked out.

Bang, bang, bang goes the door against the bookcase.

Snick!

The ice-skate falls and embeds itself in the guy’s skull. But he’s alive – that’s not fatal.

“Are you ok?” Claire calls out from the other side of the door, now that her friend has gone quiet.

Thump, thump, thump as the door rattles against the bookcase. Very slowly Claire’s bowling ball, which we now learn she keeps on the top shelf, gently rolls off and…WHAP! Smacks the top of that ice-skate – with dire consequences.

Of course there’s no way I can do this scene justice, but the film was an absolute delight. I mean I’m banging on about it now and it was like 10 years ago when I saw it! It came out in France, during the 1998 World Cup staged where?  France. So no one went to see it. And it’s been released on DVD in Germany.

As far as I am aware, that is it.

At one time Sean Penn had the remake rights but I don’t know if that is still the case.  I met James Huth once and even he didn’t have a copy of the film.  James is doing OK though, one of his more recent films (which I haven’t seen) ‘The Brice Man’ was No. 2 in the French box office for 2005 – after Star Wars: the something or other.

If you happen to have a copy, with English subtitles, please let me know.  I’d love to see it again.