Kick-Ass 2 is right up there with Poltergeist II: The Other Side, The Sting II, Jaws 2 and Exorcist II: The Heretic as one of the most lifeless, dumbest sequels ever made. The sequel that Kick-Ass 2 is most reminiscent of, however, also came out this year. That sequel is The Hangover Part III. This is due to the fact that, just as that film did...Kick-Ass 2 pulls a complete 360. It takes a completely different tone from the first one and changes the whole idea of the film and doesn't work at all. This is a very bad film with two bright spots that kept me from being totally bored. The first Kick-Ass being a legitimately great film in my eyes...I have some biased towards this dumbed down sequel and will make some comparisons through the course of this review.
This time...Kick-Ass/Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is being taught by Hit Girl/Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz) how to become a great fighter/superhero. However, Mindy just wants to lead a normal high school life and steps down from being Hit Girl. This happens right as rich kid Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse....one of the bright spots) plans to become the world's first super villain. His villain name is a name that would be unprofessional of me to type in this review. His assistant, Javier (John Leguizamo....there's the other bright spot) doesn't know what to think of his evil plans. Meanwhile, Kick-Ass joins a group of real-life superheroes that include such wacky characters as Colonel Stars And Stripes (Jim Carrey) and Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison.)
The film can be summed up by a line that is uttered a few times. In a few scenes...a character says "This isn't a comic book." The fatal flaw of the film, however is that it IS a comic book. A lot of the fun in the first one came from the fact that the superheroes lived in the real world and were totally out of place when they were walking on the streets. Here....they're placed into a world in which everyone is a cartoon therefore making no one interesting. There's a lot of stuff involving Mindy and her struggles at school as well as her trouble with her adoptive father, Marcus (Morris Chestnut.) This aspect of the film annoyed me beyond belief. I don't go to a film like this to see a teenage girl struggle through high school. That's like going to a horror film to see Pauly Shore do his schtick. Carrey could have been great but it ultimately ended up feeling like they were forcing a big name actor to be in an unrecognizable part. Moretz and Taylor-Johnson are fine but they obviously don't really want to be there. Also... all the action scenes are shot in shaky-cam...the most annoying way to shoot anything in a film.
Mintz-Plasse and Leguizamo are both funny in and of themselves and work well together. Leguizamo is in the same league as Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Philip Baker Hall and Woody Harrelson as an actor that never disappoints. However, the whole motive behind Chris could have been better executed and more interesting. I will say if you've seen the first film...you'll be disappointed that they didn't do more with Chris's motive. Javier is just there to provide a bit of comic energy as well he should be since nothing else in the film is all that entertaining. In fact...a lot of it is very, very boring.
Writer-Director Jeff Wadlow, who previously did the fighting drama Never Back Down which is admittedly a guilty pleasure for me and the pathetic high school horror film Cry_Wolf obviously has no idea to do with the material at hand here. The first one was directed by Matthew Vaughn who did the amazing action film Layer Cake before he made Kick-Ass. It showed that Vaughn knew what he was doing when directing action sequences as well as when writing an action film. The first film took a while to get started but at least both the non-superhero stuff and the superhero stuff were entertaining because they showed the absolute absurdity of the situation. Here....the film is set in such a caricature filled world that the film itself is not interesting. I know I should suspend disbelief for films like Kick-Ass 2 and I tried to. However, when the film's not only uninteresting but genuinely boring...that's where I need to put my foot down.
(1 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, crude and sexual content and brief nudity)
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