Kick-Ass 2 is a sequel to the surprise hit Kick-Ass, a lot has changed between the two films on and off camera, a new director, instead of Matthew Vaughn, we now have Jeff Wadlow (Never Back Down) also off camera, we have several different characters that now have different actors.I loved the first Kick-Ass film and was very surprised of how well the humour and story mixed together and the characters themselves were so fresh and unique.
Kick-Ass 2 needed to be bigger, funnier and crazier to beat out its predecessor... and unfortunately it just isn't as good, that's not to say its bad at all though!
I'll start with the bad, i didn't care for Mindy/Hit girl's coming of age arc throughout the film, that has her dating guys and trying out for the cheer-leading team, i understand why it was in the story, it was needed to progress the character of Mindy, but i thought they could have done a lot better. One of her scenes includes an extremely awkward promotion for a band in one scene, which was ridiculous and completely took me out of the film.
A small thing that irked me about the film was Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) had one line at the start of the film and just vanished!
Another bad thing is unfortunately there was toilet humour, which i find to be the lowest form of comedy, it's too easy and far too gross and it was very explicit here and i was very unimpressed.
The film kept on changing tones far too often, going from a dramatic death to a silly joke, this was something the first filmed handled incredibly well.
I also thought there was just a bit too much in the film, it felt like they were juggling too many things at once and thought that could have been handled differently and it all could of been fitted in perfectly.
The reason there was a lot to juggle was because the film is following 3 characters, Kick-Ass (obviously), Hit-girl and The Motherfucker (previously known as Red Mist)
Kick-Ass' story this time round was still very interesting, he wants to team up and be a superhero fighting team with Hit-girl, but she declines so he joins Justice Forever! led by Colonel Stars (Jim Carrey) Carrey was great with his role and stole the scenes he was in and turned out to be a very deep character.
The Motherfucker's story was a dark one, in the first scene you see him in he accidentally kills his mother after that he spirals out of control and becomes The Motherfucker, he hears that Kick-Ass has created a team of superheroes so he creates the first super villain team and wants to get revenge on Kick-Ass who killed his father.
Christopher Mintz-Plasse was the standout other than Jim Carrey in this film for me, his acting was spot on through his dramatic scenes and when he was in a dark scene he could still incorporate humour into his lines which is great.
The side characters in the movie were rather diverse and interesting having the opposing sides of the heroes and the villains, Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina) was great, she was menacing, crazy and HUGE! and her fight against Hit-Girl was the best of the film, the other side characters were less interesting and had more screentime, Dr Gravity (Donald Faison), Marty/Battle Guy (Clark Duke) and Todd/Ass-Kicker (Augustus Prew) were funny characters who are perfect in their roles when on screen, while other such as The Tumor (Andy Nyman) and Black Death (Daniel Kaluuya) and Genghis Carnage (Tom Wu) didn't have anything to work with and were forgettable.
All in all, Kick-Ass 2 was a good solid film which was funny and interesting but just not as good as the first one, in my opinion because of the different director.
Hopefully we'll be seeing a Kick-Ass 3 in the near future!
What did you think of Kick-Ass 2? Comment and tell me!
