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In 2010, Matthew Vaughn’s everyman superhero adventure, Kick-Ass, made fanboys (and girls) everywhere dream of donning a colorful costume and taking to the streets to fight crime. Now, director Jeff Wadlow’s sequel, Kick-Ass 2, takes a dark and moody turn that’s sure to make those all-too-eager fans reconsider their superhero dreams.
Kick-Ass 2 once again stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Dave Lizewski, the high school geek formerly known as Kick-Ass. Dave has put his crime-fighting days behind him to focus on life as a regular high school kid—but he soon realizes that he misses the excitement of his old life as a superhero.
Meanwhile, Mindy Macready, a.k.a. Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), refuses to give up on her late father’s superhero dreams. Though her guardian, Marcus (Morris Chestnut), wants her to be a normal teenage girl, Mindy skips school to continue her training in secret.
But little do Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass know that, not far away, a bitter super villain is amassing an evil army and plotting his revenge.
Vaughn’s Kick-Ass was a perfectly balanced adventure. It was dark and violent yet wildly funny, too. In the beginning of the sequel, the tone is similar—or at least it tries to be. It’s gleefully ridiculous, yet it’s still loaded with exaggerated, comic book-style action. This time around, however, the characters are less charming—and more irritating—than before. Taylor-Johnson’s Kick-Ass is extremely geeky—in a not-so-lovable way—and his new rival (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse) is whiny and spoiled, with a little too much of an annoying Criss Angel vibe.
For a while, though, it’s still pretty easy to overlook the characters’ flaws and get caught up in a story that’s playful and funny and amusingly exaggerated. But then, suddenly, it stops being fun. It turns dark and moody—and, instead of keeping its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, offering the audience a conspiratorial smirk before racing off on another enjoyably extreme adventure, it starts taking itself way too seriously. It forgets that, when all is said and done, superhero movies are supposed to be thrilling and (above all) fun—not grave and gloomy.
Despite its nagging character flaws, Kick-Ass 2 could have been an entertaining superhero adventure. It certainly tries—at least for a while. But it eventually loses the playful sense of humor that made the original such a smart yet silly superhero hit, replacing it with all the moodiness and melodrama of a Twilight movie. And, as a result, instead of walking out of the theater ready to take on the world, audiences will most likely walk out of the theater feeling moody and irritable and ready to take on a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
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