I very rarely write reviews here in IMDb, but for this title I really felt compelled. Hope this is useful for the community.
Kiki is a remake of a comedy released only 2 years before called The Little Death, which was written and directed by Australian Josh Lawson.
I think that remakes are a delicate thing. A director must have a very powerful reason to remake a movie, and to do it "because I liked it and I wanted to do it myself" isn't a good enough reason for me. There are way too many good untold stories to be told to waste money and talent re-telling stories that were told yesterday, just for the sake of it.
The Little Death is an amazing movie. It's light, intelligent, subtle, funny, well written. It's the kind of movie that leaves a smile on your face for a long time. It also has in my opinion one of the funniest scenes on the history of the cinema - and by reading reviews and comments I noticed that this opinion is shared by many people.
Unfortunately Kiki couldn't manage to improve it at all. In fact what it did was to make it vulgar. Kiki is just full of fowl language. The smart dialogues and the innuendo present in the first movie became a stream of f-words, swearing, in-your-face jokes that simply didn't work for me. The movies aren't identical. Kiki does throw some 10-15% of new or original elements into the plot, but these are the weakest parts of the movie. They are not funny or smart, and sometimes they're plain gross.
When I consider what Kiki made with the original movie, I can only feel that The Little Death vs Kiki is like Woody Allen vs. Eddie Murphy. It's Charlie Chaplin vs Charlie Sheen. It's intelligent vs. in-your-face humour. That's what Kiki managed to put on top of Lawson's story. All the cleverness you'll find within Kiki (and I'm not saying there's none) came from Lawson's script. The original elements... they're just weak.
In Kiki the acting is inferior, the way the stories are weaved is much less interesting. The casting is way, way inferior. Lawson managed to create a magic chemistry with his casting that's nowhere to be found in Kiki. Not by a long shot.
Kiki is not a bad movie in itself. And it's very beautiful visually. But when a movie is a remake, comparing it to the original one is something that's unavoidable. And Kiki failed to improve The Little Death in any sense.
My suggestion: if you haven't seen any of them, watch The Little Death first! If you watch Kiki first, it'll ruin the novelty and the joy of watching the - much superior - original title.
