10 Times Comic Book Movies Departed From The Canon And It Was Great

8. Kick-Ass 2 - There's No Gang Rape Scene

On the subject of Kick-Ass, perhaps the quality of Vaughn and Goldman's work on that bold, brash, ballsy picture can be appreciated by how conspicuously lightning failed to strike twice with its jumbled mess of a sequel. While Cry_Wolf and Never Back Down writer-director Jeff Wadlow may not have the best track record, though, it would be wrong to blame the lacklustre sequel's failings on his inability to translate Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s comic sequel into film. In fact, many of Kick-Ass 2's flaws stem directly from trying to replicate a source that is itself somewhat confused about what made the first one stand out from the crowd of subversive superhero send-ups in the first place. Millar and Romita's sequel seems to feel that simply making the violence more extreme, more disturbing and more shocking would somehow enable them to make the same impact with this follow-up as they had with the first. Wadlow's biggest mistake was going along with this. Conversely, therefore, his best decisions were those that stepped away from Millar and Romita's comic sequel and instead thought about what would work for a movie sequel instead. The most obvious of these shifts is the treatment of Kick-Ass' sort-of love interest Katie Deauxma. Katie is a really difficult character to get right because she doesn't appear to have any real motivations or life of her own in either the original comic or film. Her reaction to Dave's confession that he has been pretending to be gay to spend time with her is more plausible in the comic, but still makes her come across as unpleasant, while in the film her decision to just go with it and enter a relationship with him is a weird character decision but serves a narrative function. To compound the difficulty, the sequel comic seems to begin her story with a version of the character much closer to the likable but implausible film iteration than the one from the first comic. And then she gets raped. Brutally and repeatedly by sidekick turned supervillain The Motherf*cker and his gang. Even though it's supposed to be shocking and boundary pushing, there's an element of Kick-Ass that's also supposed to be enjoyable. This scene does nothing but leave a bad taste and turns an already poorly defined character into simply the motivation for the hero (the age-old "women in refrigerators" comic book trope). The movie doesn't really know what to do with Katie either, but writing her out by being overly suspicious of Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl's relationship is a much neater way of dealing with that fact. Meanwhile, the rape scene is replaced by the impotent Motherf*cker failing to do the same to Kick-Ass' new love interest Night-Bitch, with actor Christopher Mintz-Plasse reportedly very relieved that the film did not pursue this plot further.