Jim Carrey, Kick-Ass 2's Colonel Stars and Stripes, has taken to Twitter to condemn the level of violence in the film and distance himself from its promotional campaign. The actor explained that the massacre at Sandy Hook in December had changed his attitude towards the movie.
“I did Kick-Ass a month before Sandy Hook, and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence,” he told his Twitter followers. “My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”
If Carrey has raised the issue of movie violence and its possible social repercussions at the worst possible time for his Kick-Ass 2 collaborators, he was at pains to point out that he is "not ashamed" of the film and has acted out of conscience after "recent events caused a change in my heart".
Mark Millar, Kick-Ass creator, took to his blog to describe Carrey's tweets as “surprising” and reject Carrey's comments. “[I'm] baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in this picture wasn’t in the screenplay 18 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," he wrote.
"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... This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorsese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Park Chan-wook, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless bodycount of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the *consequences *of violence... Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can’t be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action-movie.”
Millar defended the violence in the film, asking readers to “imagine a John Wayne picture where he wasn’t packing, or a Rocky movie where Stallone wasn’t punching someone repeatedly in the face", and stressed that he shares Carrey's outlook on violence in society. “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!”
Decide for yourself when Kick-Ass 2 comes out in the UK on August 14.