Kick Ass 2 - filmed at TRL

Despite somewhat indifferent reviews in various parts of the press, me and a small group of my fellow TRL employees took a trip into Reading last week on Saturday afternoon to watch Kick Ass 2 at the Vue.  Aside from the interest we had in seeing the follow up to the surprisingly subversive Kick Ass, the film held special interest to us because a film crew spent time on the TRL test track last year filming something for the movie.  These things never get officially announced at TRL, but when fluorescent signs directing people to KA2 crop up around the site - people quickly start asking questions and spreading information on the grapevine.

For me, the thing that made Kick Ass such an exciting movie was the way that it shocked, the way that it took a bunch of conventions and shat on them while telling you all about the composition of the shit it had just produced.  It used Nicholas Cage's acting skills effectively (how often can anyone say that?) and gave the world a new future star in Chloe Grace Moretz - who's filth-laden taunting led the audience in the cinema I saw the film to literally gasp in shock that a 11 year old girl could say such things.  The big problem with making a sequel to such a film is that you can't really be shocking any more, since that's what everyone's expecting.

Kick Ass 2 picks up the story a few years after the first.  Mindy (aka Hit Girl) is trying to be a normal 16 year old girl, Dave (aka Kick Ass) is trying to convince her to be Hit Girl again by re-igniting the crime-fighting fires.  It's about as straight a story as a post-modern super-hero spoof can be.  Mindy doesn't want to be Hit Girl any more - or does she?  Her guardian certainly doesn't want her to take after her father, so she does her best to try to fit in with the other kids at school and leave her PVC-wearing crime-fighting days behind her.  But with Kick Ass back in action beating up with a bunch of other super hero wannabes, Hit Girl's probably going to have to come and save them.

People who say that swearing isn't clever clearly haven't seen The Thick of It.  Kick Ass 2 doesn't get as colourful as Armando Ianucci's classic, but they give a good go of it as Mindy mouths off appropriately at her high school.  Some of these scenes feel a little odd - mainly one in which Mindy and her new mates come over all dreamy-eyed watching a boy band video - but the dirty humour and poo gags are generally done better than most of the frat boy stuff that normally comes out of the Vince Vaughn / Seth Rogen.

When the scenes finally arrived in which TRL's test track is clearly visible, the 4th wall was totally broken for me as I spent the entire sequence looking at the background to see our track and trying to work out if Chloe Grace Moretz was ever at TRL or in fact they used a stunt double for the whole thing.  It looks like every shot where the background is visible you can only see the back of Hit Girl's head, while all the shots of Moretz's face are in close up or look suspiciously green-screened.  I guess that means that all the stuff at TRL was done by the 2nd unit, and that no big stars were ever here.  Not this time anyway.

Kick Ass 2 isn't as good as Kick Ass, mainly for the reason that shock-value only works once.  It's still a fun film though as long as you're happy to watch crudity, foul-mouthed banter and stylised ultra-violence.  The film may be called Kick Ass - but the real star is Hit Girl.  Given the amount of time that Chloe Grace Moretz spends not actually playing Hit Girl in the film, I think only a fool would bet against Hit Girl - the movie coming to a screen near you eventually.