Jeff Wadlow inherits Matthew Vaughn’s franchise and runs three films at once: a vigilante club, a high-school comedy and a revenge fantasy in leather. Moretz is worth watching in all of them. The rest is loud, flat and unsure whether it is joking.
The first Kick-Ass, from 2010, was directed by Matthew Vaughn and got its charge from one nasty idea: what if a child did the things comic-book heroes do, and the film showed you the blood. Vaughn has stayed on as producer and handed the sequel to Jeff Wadlow, who writes and directs, and the handover is the story of the film. Wadlow has the same characters, the same jokes and the same source, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr’s comic, and he has made something that looks like Kick-Ass and behaves like a television pilot for it.
The script runs three stories side by side. Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) joins Justice Forever, a basement club of costumed amateurs. Mindy (Chloë Grace Moretz) gives up Hit Girl for the dance team and the popular girls. Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) becomes the Motherfucker and buys himself a gang. Each has a decent idea in it and Wadlow cannot get any of them to talk to the others. Eddie Hamilton cuts between them as if changing channels, and for long stretches the film simply stops one story to remind us another exists.
Moretz is the reason the middle one works. She plays Mindy as a girl who can break a man’s arm and has no idea how to sit at a lunch table, and the high-school scenes have a tension the fights do not. The dance-team audition is staged as a training montage, and it is the one sequence where the comedy and the character are the same thing. We laughed properly at it. What follows, a revenge on the mean girls involving a device we will not describe, is where we stopped laughing and started wondering who the film thought was watching.
Jim Carrey has a good ten minutes as the Colonel, a soft-spoken man who has found God and kept the bat, and Sammy Sheldon dresses him in army surplus and a mask that looks bought at a garage sale, which is right. John Leguizamo, as Chris’s bodyguard Javier, gets the driest lines and delivers them like a man watching an expensive car being reversed into a wall. Mintz-Plasse is game, and his character is a sulking rich boy in his mother’s leather, which is funny once and is asked to be funny for an hour. Carrey has said publicly that he could not support the film’s violence. We can see why, though the violence is not quite the problem.
The problem is that Wadlow does not know what the violence is for. Vaughn shot the first film’s carnage as pop art, with colour and rhythm. Tim Maurice-Jones lights this one flat and bright, like a daytime soap, and the fights are covered by a handheld camera that jitters when it should hold still. A brawl in a moving van on the motorway, with a towering henchwoman called Mother Russia tearing through policemen, is the one set piece with a shape; Hamilton cuts it clean and it is over quickly. The warehouse finale is a crowd scene in the dark. Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson’s score does the work the pictures are not doing, telling us when to cheer.
Then there is a scene in the second half that most reviews have fixed on, and which we will not describe beyond saying that something ugly is set up and then waved away as a joke. It lasts about a minute and we do not want to make it the whole review. But we sat there cold, and the reason is not squeamishness. The first film knew exactly what it was doing when it made you flinch. This one throws the moment in with the fart gags and moves on, and that is the point at which we stopped trusting it about anything else.
Russell De Rozario’s Justice Forever hideout looks properly homemade, all borrowed furniture and hand-lettered signs, and it is the film’s one honest joke about what amateurs are. Most critics have landed around the middle, split between those who enjoyed the noise and those who found it cynical, and we are near them. At 103 minutes it is not long and it feels longer.
If you loved the first one, Moretz gives you a reason to sit through this. If you did not, nothing here will change your mind. It carries a 15 certificate, and the certificate is doing more work than the script.
