Kick In The… Ah, Forget It: Jim Carrey Disavows Kick-Ass 2, Mark Millar Responds

Kick-Ass 2, the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s and John Romita Jr.’s first sequel to Kick-Ass (which itself was made into a movie with much of the same cast as the first Kick-Ass 2 movie three years ago), is scheduled to open in the United States on August 16th. And considering that it has been a big summer of superhero movies so far, what with Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel, with The Wolverine and R.I.P.D. on the way, one would think that the Universal Studios would be excited to ramp up the publicity machine, maybe including a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, with some of the stars of the movie, including the biggest name, Jim Carrey, who’s playing Colonel Stars and Stripes in the flick.

Yeah, you’d think that, except, you know… you’d be pretty fucking wrong.

I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to e

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

I meant to say my apologies to others involve with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

Okay, this is a tricky thing to comment on. Because on one hand, you’ve gotta respect a guy who’s willing to publicly state a conviction, and stand by it. And God knows that gun violence in the United States is a serious issue that is worthy of continued debate.

On the other hand… did you read Kick-Ass 2, Jim? Hell, did you at least watch the first Kick-Ass movie? And if you did either: can Universal Studios expect a refund check for your fee?

Again, this is a tricky stance to make a definitive comment on. There’s a lot of gun violence here in the good old US of A, and it seems like there is more and more of it, and more and more of it seemingly random and against strangers for no reason at all. And nobody wants to be the guy who does or says the one thing that inspires some dipfuck moron to pick up an AR-15 (which is a rifle that is ridiculously easy to use; I fired one once at a gun range, and was able to hit targets at 50 yards pretty well within a clip or two, and I had never fired a rifle that wasn’t designed to kill eight-bit ducks on a TV screen before) and do something unspeakable.

So the idea of Jim Carrey taking a principled stance to turn his back on his work in a story that is, admittedly, extremely violent, is something that can be understood and empathized with… however, it is problematic, for a few reasons. The first being that his stance implies that he thinks Kick-Ass 2 might inspire someone to that kind of gun violence. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy that.

Every time someone throws a mental rod and shoots a place up, people want to blame the movies that they watch or the games that they play or the music that they listen to, and I simply don’t believe that. Call of Duty never made anyone kill someone; after four hours playing video games, my legs don’t work well enough to propel me into a shootout, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. On paper, I was a textbook case for someone to grab a gun and start blasting away: I liked hard rock and violent movies and comic books and read a lot about explosives… and yet the biggest shot I’ve ever taken involved Goldschlager.

Conversely, the literally All-American, normal, popular football hero I went to junior high school with (seriously: he was named an official, All-American athlete) is the one who walked into the high school cafeteria with a loaded shotgun (I won’t link the incident, because the kid didn’t actually hurt anyone. He was tackled by the cops before he could pull the trigger, has since moved on to lead, I hear, a productive and peaceful life. And besides: when he did it, I not only had moved away, but was in college hundreds of miles away. So let the freaky nutjob live his life… especially since he beat me in two out of three fistfights in elementary school. Besides: whether or not he could still kick my ass, I hear he likes to point shotguns at people who piss him off).

So clearly, having literally lived the difference between someone into the stuff that popularly causes random gun violence while someone the exact opposite did, you know, the actual gun violence, I cannot believe that the movies or the comics are what does it to you… but what the hell: Carrey spent years living with someone with similarly anecdotal evidence that vaccines make you spastic, so I can’t really hold it against him for making a stand on his principles on that basis. But there are principles and there are principles, Jim. By which I mean: where’s the money, chief?

Carrey signed on to play a supporting part in a movie based on a comic book that features some pretty extreme violence. And granted, that was before the Sandy Hook tragedy, but it doesn’t change the fact that the man took a check to do a job of work, and one would assume that that job included promoting the fucking movie. I’ve never heard of any actor who actually likes doing promotional tours, so one would assume that doing that shit detail is part of the deal… and Jim just said he ain’t gonna follow through. So I guess Universal can expect a refund check in the mail any day now, right Jim? Hello? Is this thing on?

But here’s the thing that really gets me: Jim claims that it was the Sandy Hook incident, which occurred just a month before shooting on Kick-Ass 2 wrapped, that made him think that the gun violence was too much to actively participate in. But it was after the Aurora shootings, where a bunch of comic book movie fans were ruthlessly gunned down by a guy who dyed his hair like a color-blind version of the villain in that movie’s prequel. So a shooting at a school is enough for him to punt on his promotional responsibilities, but a shooting of the kind of people who were most likely to actually see the movie he took the check for? Well, that’s clearly fine… and that means he will happily take money when it’s only comic book fans getting killed. And that’s you and me, Bubba.

Is that a stretch, and probably terrible hyperbole? Sure it is. But Jim Carrey just stuck a fork in the publicity campaign of a movie production that hired and paid him in, presumably, good faith, and his did it based on a single terrible incident… but a similar single terrible incident that directly targeted the audience of the movie he signed on for? Hey, I guess that’s okay!

Ah, fuck it. Moral relativism in regards to mass slaughter is a sucker’s game. Suffice it to say that, if Carrey announces that he is refunding some percentage of his fee for acting in Kick-Ass 2, or that he is donating that percentage to the victims of Sandy Hook (or Aurora), I’ll back off and applaud his willingness to back his principles with more than about 200 characters on a free microblogging service. But until then? Fuck that guy.

But at least Kick-Ass creator Mark Millar is a little more forgiving, if no less apparently somewhat baffled, in his official response to Carrey’s announcement.

As you may know, Jim is a passionate advocate of gun-control and I respect both his politics and his opinion, but I’m baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in this picture wasn’t in the screenplay eighteen months ago. Yes, the body-count is very high, but a movie called Kick-Ass 2 really has to do what it says on the tin. A sequel to the picture that gave us HIT-GIRL was always going to have some blood on the floor and this should have been no shock to a guy who enjoyed the first movie so much. My books are very hardcore, but the movies are adapted for a more mainstream audience and if you loved the tone of the first picture you’re going to eat this up with a big, giant spoon. Like Jim, I’m horrified by real-life violence (even though I’m Scottish), but Kick-Ass 2 isn’t a documentary. No actors were harmed in the making of this production! This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorcese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-Wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless body-count of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence, whether it’s the ramifications for friends and family or, as we saw in the first movie, Kick-Ass spending six months in hospital after his first street altercation. Ironically, Jim’s character in Kick-Ass 2 is a Born-Again Christian and the big deal we made of the fact that he refuses to fire a gun is something he told us attracted him to the role in the first place.

Ultimately, this is his decision, but I’ve never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real-life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more Boy Wizards in real-life. Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can’t be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action-movie. Imagine a John Wayne picture where he wasn’t packing or a Rocky movie where Stallone wasn’t punching someone repeatedly in the face. Our audience is smart enough to know they’re all pretending and we should instead just sit back and enjoy the serotonin release of seeing bad guys meeting bad ends as much as we enjoyed seeing the Death Star exploding. The action in Kick-Ass 2 is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. The humour, the characters, the heart and the set-pieces are all things we’re very proud of and the only warning I’d really include is that it’s almost TOO EXCITING. Kick-Ass 2 is fictional fun so let’s focus our ire instead of the real-life violence going on in the world like the war in Afghanistan, the alarming tension in Syria right now and the fact that Superman just snapped a guy’s fucking neck.

Jim, I love ya and I hope you reconsider for all the above points. You’re amazing in this insanely fun picture and I’m very proud of what Jeff, Matthew and all the team have done here.

(via Bleeding Cool)