PLOT: After inspiring a wave of new people to don costumes and fight crime, David Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) comes out of retirement, and once again becomes Kick-Ass. With Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) sidelined by a need to be a “normal teenager”, Kick-Ass joins Justice Forever, a superhero club run by a former Mafia thug, turned born-again superhero calling himself Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey). Meanwhile, wanting to avenge the death of his father, Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), aka Red Mist, has decided to reinvent himself as a super-villain named “The Motherf**ker”, complete with his own army of psychos.
REVIEW: Writer/director Jeff Wadlow’s Kick-Ass 2 is actually here, however, we have to wonder if maybe we should have left this franchise where it started.
Telling three separate narratives within one big story, the sequel finds Dave Lizewski a.k.a. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor Johnson) continuing his efforts to help the city as a low-rent superhero; Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) leaving the violent vigilante world behind to try and be a normal teenager; and Chris D’Amico a.k.a. The Motherf**ker (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) looking for revenge against Kick-Ass for killing his father, becoming the world’s first supervillain in the process. While two of these narratives manage to be modestly entertaining, Mindy’s story drags the whole film down. Kick-Ass’s efforts to join a team of fellow amateur crime-fighters called Justice Forever introduces some interesting, though underdeveloped, side characters like Jim Carrey’s born-again, ex-mobster Captain Stars and Stripes. Chris's transformation into The Motherfucker’s gives the audience a peek into how a supervillain kick starts their career. But Hit-Girl (who was the best part of the first film) gets screwed over by being stuck in an R-rated, half-baked version of Mean Girls. In the shadow of Kick-Ass’s crime fighting The Motherf**ker’s chaos, watching Mindy go up against a Regina George rip-off just feels like a waste of an interesting character and a talented young actress.
The choppy structure holding it all together doesn't make these narratives mesh any better. The stories are really only connected whenever Kick-Ass tries to get Hit-Girl to put on her costume again, but outside of that the film just bounces back and forth, failing to establish any real rhythm. Up until the climactic finale, the three central arcs feel completely disjointed, which isn’t exactly what you want to see in a sequel that’s supposed to reunite the fun, interesting characters from the first movie.
Kick-Ass 2 has focused a lot of its marketing focusing on the movie’s gratuitous violence and shock value, but it weirdly doesn’t even deliver on that front. While there certainly is plenty of gore to go around – characters getting stabbed, shot and having body parts chopped off – but it isn’t anything you don’t normally see in an R-rated action film. Even the impact of Moretz’s Hit-Girl is lessened, as the actress has grown a lot in the last three years and isn’t the same adolescent we saw in the 2010 original. I’d even go as far as to say that the movie is far more graphic when it comes to language, but even that feels mostly forced.
There’s a good amount to like in Kick-Ass 2, including some manic performances from Mintz-Plasse and Carrey as well as some cool comic book flourishes by Wadlow. But the good stuff is continually buried in the things the movie gets wrong. The end of the film does set up the story for a potential part three, and while part of me wants to see if there’s any chance the series could be redeemed, it might just be smarter to let sleeping dogs lie.
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