Ugh, this movie. This fucking movie.
From my experiences with the first film and everything else with Mark Millar’s fingerprints on it I had a feeling I was not going to like Kick-Ass 2. I was right, but not for the reasons I expected.
Writer/director Jeff Wadlow (stepping in for Matt Vaughn) looked at the source material and scrubbed the movie of most of Millar’s worst instincts, however in doing so he threw the baby out with the bathwater and made a film that’s aggressively dull. When I reviewed the first Kick-Ass I said that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kick-Ass was the least interesting thing in his own movie. That’s not true in this case, but only because everything else around him is equally bland.
The whole thing is just so… sanitized and inoffensive. How is it that a movie with a character called the Mother Fucker can so easily be edited for constant airings on FX?
At least this one (for the most part) lives up to the promise of the first entry and focuses on the idea of realistic superheroes by having a cast primarily made up of “real life superheroes” (along the lines of Phoenix Jones) and largely ignoring Kick-Ass’s invulnerablity to pain, though Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) clearly still has powers and fights like Trinity.
(Exactly like Trinity.)
Normally in a review I’d give a brief description of the plot, but I can’t really do that with Kick-Ass 2 as it doesn’t really have one. The Mother Fucker (played by Christopher Stop Calling Me McLovin’ Mintz-Plasse) has a storyline going, but for Kick-Ass, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. He gets trained for a while by Hit Girl, who quits to be a normal teenager. He joins a team of superheroes. The Mother Fucker starts attacking them and then the cops go after everyone in costumes. Finally Kick-Ass and the Mother Fucker have to fight. But there’s no throughline. Nothing happens because of anything else until the Mother Fucker gets involved.
If the movie was told through his point of view, it might have been interesting. But as it is, there is nothing at all interesting about Kick-Ass 2.
Kick-Ass 2 is boring and nowhere near as edgy as it thinks it is. It’s not a good movie.
I give it 1 VERY OBVIOUS ENDING out of 10
