Matthew Vaughn’s first Kick-Ass movie walked a fine line between satire and camp and managed to be a fairly sharp deconstruction of the superhero genre with some great characters and outrageous moments. Then there’s Kick-Ass 2, which got all the over-the-top violence right, but what director Jeff Wadlow forgot is any sense of subtlety or finesse.
Of course, maybe the fault lay in killing off Nicolas Cage’s character in part one, or maybe Chloë Grace Moretz’s Hit Girl schtick of ultra-violence and coarse language isn’t as funny at 16 as it was 12. Or maybe, Wadlow didn’t realize that there was more to the first Kick-Ass than just a bunch of people in crappy costumes and delusions of super-grandeur.
On top of it all, surrounded by a summer slate that included Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, and The Wolverine, Kick-Ass 2 looked cheap by comparison. Forget Jim Carrey’s comments about the film’s violence, what he really should have protested was how he was horribly misused by the filmmakers, and how the entire endeavour was one giant missed opportunity to say something, anything, about our cinematic obsession with super men and women. What could have been a fine piece of summer counter-programming fit too snugly into it and became just another crappy blockbuster, looking to cash in on older, better efforts.