His heroic antics having inspired a citywide wave of masked vigilantes, Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) joins their ranks to help clean up the streets, only to face a formidable challenge when the vengeful Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) transforms himself into the world's first super villain in this sequel written and directed by Jeff Wadlow (Never Back Down). Dave/Kick-Ass and Mindy/Hit Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) are about to graduate high school and become a crime-fighting duo when their noble plans are foiled by Mindy's strict parents. Now, as Mindy hangs up her Hit Girl uniform and navigates the treacherous high-school social scene, Kick-Ass begins patrolling the streets with Justice Forever, a fearless group of urban watchdogs fronted by former mob thug Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey). They've got the criminal element on the run when Chris D'Amico lays his Red Mist persona to rest, and reemerges as The Mother F**ker, a powerful criminal mastermind with a loyal legion of henchmen. The Mother F**ker is determined to avenge the death of his late father, who previously perished at the hands of Kick-Ass and Hit Girl. Now, as The Mother F**ker and his minions begin targeting the members of Justice Forever, Hit Girl realizes that the only way to save Kick-Ass and his new friends is to emerge from her forced retirement, and fight back with everything she's got. John Leguizamo, Donald Faison, Morris Chestnut, and Robert Emms co-star
The Guardian Review
In 2010, screenwriter Jane Goldman and director Matthew Vaughn brought Kick-Ass to the screen, the creation of graphic novelist Mark Millar. It was a brilliant and brazen black-comic fantasy about a shy teen trying to make it as an actual crime fighter. Goldman and Vaughn ignited a new spirit of punk rock in the world of masks and capes. They challenged the placid superhero supergroups, and for my money revived the authentic teen romance and teen pathos of comic-book escapism. Now an enjoyable, though less daring and more conventional sequel has reunited the two young stars of that bizarre and bizarrely thrilling escapade: Dave Lizewski, Kick-Ass himself (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is painfully readjusting to civilian existence in high school, and the newly orphaned Mindy, or Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is trying to maintain her superhero vocation while dealing with adolescence.
Kick-Ass 2
Production year: 2013
Countries: Rest of the world, USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 113 mins
Directors: Jeff Wadlow
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Iain Glen, Jim Carrey, Lyndsy Fonseca, Morris Chestnut
Meanwhile, obnoxious rich kid and wannabe superhero Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), formerly known as Red Mist, has decided that his real destiny is to be a supervillain, and after rummaging through his late mother's more recherché outfits, puts together a leathery costume, calls himself the Motherfucker, and leaves the Freudian associations unexamined. His utter evilness is clinched when he reveals himself to be on Twitter, with more than 1,000 followers.
This second Kick-Ass is now directed by Jeff Wadlow (who made the mixed martial-arts drama Never Back Down), with Vaughn and Goldman credited as producers; it delivers less in the way of boot-buttock contact. The showdown of superheroes v supervillains is less interesting, and it is disappointing that Kick-Ass agrees to take second-fiddle status to a new homemade hero, Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey), whose role is underwritten and amounts to hardly more than an extended cameo. When the C-bomb was dropped in the first movie, it was a delicious and insolent provocation, designed to trigger moral panic and high sub-collar temperatures in pundits everywhere. Now it sounds a bit lame.
But there's one really good thing about this film, and that is Chloë Moretz's Hit-Girl. She shows herself to be still the most stylish superhero around. Body-doubled or not, Moretz's martial-arts scenes look terrifically good, and she is coolly assured in every scene she is in, pinching the camera's attention without effort from Taylor-Johnson, although he, too, is likable and relaxed. For me, Hit-Girl kicks the ass of the superhero world's overdog males. She gets gold; Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man is silver and Christian Bale's Dark Knight is bronze, with Henry Cavill's Man of Steel not medalling.
Hit-Girl's high-school storyline is the most interesting thing in the film. If only the whole thing could have been about Mindy and her new dilemma. As she enters high school at the age of 15, Hit-Girl finds that despite her warrior skills and physical strength growing gloriously in training with every passing day, she is under pressure to abandon everything and be a normal, simpering teenager interested only in clothes and boys. That was what she promised her dad, and what she now has to promise her new guardian, Marcus (Morris Chestnut). So she submits, in classic teen-movie style, to being a geeky makeover "project" for a manipulative clique of mean-girl queen bees, led by the chilling Brooke (Claudia Lee). When she was 11, Hit-Girl could take on everyone, but now teenagerdom and social norms have made her weak and pathetic, while secretly boiling with frustration. It makes for a sharp and entertaining social satire. And the scene where Mindy is taken on a date by some smirking jock left a residue of unease with me. I realised, hours after the film ended, what it had reminded me of: Gretchen Mol's innocent and trusting young woman in The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) getting asked in the street to get in a car to go on a "date" with a guy she'd never met before.
Kick-Ass 2 has some of the original's chutzpah: Iain Glen has a simmering cameo as an imprisoned gangster, and fans of magician and actor Andy Nyman will savour his appearance as a bad guy insidiously named the Tumor. The Motherfucker keeps cheekily saying that he is the "first supervillain", thus mightily dissing all those supervillains who have come before him in their own fictional worlds, although he strikes a false note in claiming: "My superpower is that I am rich as shit," when that has long been a very commonplace thing to say about Bruce Wayne.
It's a moderate follow-up to the first exhilarating adventure. If there is to be another episode, it must surely be a Wolverine-style solo outing for Chloë Moretz's Hit-Girl. She is the real star.
