Kick-Ass 2 Review

• 13th Aug 2013

The aftermath of the first film finds Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kick-Ass a string influence on others and many a masked vigilante is crawling out of the woodwork. Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz) on the other hand is being forced by her adoptive father to give up the Hit Girl persona and to try to become a more “Ordinary” girl. All the while, remnant villain Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is still fuming at Kick-Ass for the death of his father and reinvents himself as the “Mother Fucker” and sets about throwing cash at his problems and hiring his own team of goons to get his revenge.

The film is divided into these three strands. Kick-Ass out on the streets patrolling with some newly made friends including Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey -along for the ride this time, albeit in only a handful of scenes). This is perhaps the least interesting of the scenes as all the colourful characters that are brought in get very little say in anything and all look tragically terrible.

Mindy’s strand is perhaps the most bizarre as she steps into what appears to be a sequel to clueless littered with some truly terrible stereotypes and with a rather muddled message about her persona that come the end of the film still hasn’t really made much sense.

The issue with all of these problems is that they seem to spend a good 90 minutes of the running time being explained and explored before anything really starts to happen or head in a direction we’d like it to.

The film’s saving graces then are pretty much the bad guys. Well some of them. Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Ironically his character has a lot of the main changes done from the graphic novel. The Mother Fucker as he becomes known (or would like to be known) does some seriously nasty stuff in this film that is paid reference to, but alternate actions are carried out instead.  This perhaps works for the comedy aspect of the film – but ultimately by the end you still have a guy who is slightly better at fighting than in the first film, still handing the ass to a villain who has not bothered to learn how to fight and instead throws money at his problems.  Hardly a rousing finale – but Mintz-Plasse takes a very toned done script and really injects as much on screen chemistry he can with anyone he works with, and also leads the charge with hypnotic vigour – never embarrassed to kick his character down for the sake of audience laughs.

It is to this end that perhaps the films best scenes are when he is onscreen, in particular with bodyguard Javier (a severely underused, but very entertaining John Leguizamo).

A little less of the cheesy drama and a little more action would have helped.  There are a couple of moments in the film that do stand out, but come the end you’ll be groaning at the lapse into lazy scripting and predictable plot mechanics that sink the film into the genre it is meant to be making commentary on. Instead this simply just does as they do.

A shame as there are plenty of undertones and character similarities that they could have drawn parallels from. Instead you’ve got a sequel that will divert your attention for a while but won’t leave you begging for a third film anytime soon.

Steven Hurst