KICK-ASS 2. REVIEWED.

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

Rating- 15

Running Time- 1 hour 43 minutes

Directed by- Jeff Wadlow

Written by- Jeff Wadlow

Kick-Ass 2 wasn’t a film I was particularly excited for when it was first announced but after recently re-viewing its predecessor my anticipation levels rose dramatically. Maybe that’s why I was so disappointed with the sequel or maybe it was just because it was a bad film.

The writers of the first Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughan and Jane Goldman, 2010) took a back seat for this one, Vaughan taking up the role of producer, so it fell to Jeff Wadlow to continue the story of unlikely superhero Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). So how did he fair? Not too well unfortunately. While the general plot of the movie was solid, the dialogue and the makeup of the individual scenes were hit and miss, but mostly just miss. The good moments were very good and the bad moments were truly awful and plague most of the film. This leads me to believe that that Wadlow is either a sporadic genius or he just blindly fired a metaphorical machine gun at a target labelled ‘good ideas’ and naturally hit it a few times but most of the time he was way off the mark. It seems clear to me that he was attempting to play it safe by trying to recreate the formula of the first film while shoe horning the story around that. But what he ended up doing is hand picking every good feature of the first film and taking it too far, to an extent that ruined what made it good in the first place.

But I feel the reason the film was filled with such poor material is because it was missing a key ingredient from the first film and that was Nicolas Cage. Usually I find Nicolas Cage films entertaining because his acting is so bad that he himself becomes hilarious to watch but in Kick-Ass he played the character of Big Daddy perfectly and he was sorely missed in the sequel. It seemed that the film makers tried to replace him with Jim Carrey but while his character was intriguing and had potential to become the film’s best character, he was grossly underused and so that potential wasn’t allowed to manifest itself into anything concrete and he remained somewhat of an enigma throughout the movie. So in the end there really wasn’t a stand out character who would become the fans’ favourite as Cage’s character was in the original, the character of Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison) was probably the closest to achieving that but was such as minor character that he was easily forgotten for large parts of the film. But maybe that’s why he seemed the best character, because we didn’t see enough of him to eventually grow tired of him as was the case with most of the other characters.

I think that in the end the film suffers from gross negligence on the part of the makers. They tried so hard to recreate the style of the first film that they forgot what they were originally trying to achieve. Maybe the reason a new writer was brought in is because they thought a fresh approach would do the film some good but if this was the case Wadlow certainly wasn’t briefed and instead of coming at the film from a different angle he forced himself to follow the same path as the first film even though that path should have been closed off because it no longer leads anywhere. So all in all I can’t give this film any more than two stars, so that is what I will give it.

Final Rating. Two Stars.

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