Jeff Wadlow makes films that want to hand you action, jokes and feeling in the same scene, and usually manage one. A competent builder of teenage horror for Blumhouse, he inherited Kick-Ass and made it louder without making it mean anything.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Kick-Ass 2 (2013) a towering henchwoman called Mother Russia tears through a van full of policemen on a motorway, and for two minutes the film knows what it is. Eddie Hamilton cuts it clean, it is over quickly, and it is the one set piece in the picture with a shape. Around it Jeff Wadlow runs three stories at once, a vigilante club, a high-school comedy and a revenge fantasy in leather, and cannot get any of them to talk to the others. That is his habit in miniature. He wants action, humour and emotion in every film, pushes all three harder than the last person did, and ends up with a picture that changes channels.
He has been directing for twenty years without settling into one kind of film. Cry_Wolf (2005) was a debut he wrote and directed; Never Back Down (2008) was a mixed-martial-arts picture that became a franchise. A spec script for a Kick-Ass sequel persuaded Matthew Vaughn to hand him the series as writer and director, and the handover is the story of that film: the same characters, the same Mark Millar and John Romita Jr comic, and something that looks like Kick-Ass and behaves like a television pilot for it. Television writing followed, on Bates Motel and The Strain, and then a run of horror films with the producer Jason Blum: Truth or Dare (2018), Fantasy Island (2020) and Imaginary (2024), with The Curse of Bridge Hollow (2022) between them.
What he is good at is the mechanism. Reviews of Imaginary credit him with jump scares built in pictures rather than dialogue, and he has said he prefers effects done in camera with digital work added only where needed, which is the right instinct for horror pitched at teenagers. What he is less good at is deciding what the mechanism is for. In Kick-Ass 2 Vaughn's pop-art carnage became something Tim Maurice-Jones lit flat and bright like a daytime soap, covered by a handheld camera that jitters when it should hold still, while Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson's score told us when to cheer because the pictures were not doing it. We came out of it less angry than tired, because a film that stops one story every ten minutes to remind you another exists never lets you care about any of them. The complaint that follows him from film to film is predictability: a familiar premise, given a twist, played out in the order you expect.
He has said of Imaginary that he is "not trying to ruin anyone's psychic peace with some horrible vision that they can't ever unsee", and that he wants audiences "to enjoy it the same way we enjoy roller coasters". That is an honest aim and a modest one, and it describes the career. Wadlow makes the film you can take a fourteen-year-old to on a wet Saturday, and he makes it competently. Ask more of him and Kick-Ass 2 is the answer: the one time he inherited a film with a nasty idea in it, he made it louder and lost the idea.
Biography
Jeff Wadlow is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 2 March 1976 in Arlington, Virginia, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in history and film, and from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in 2001.
Wadlow directed and wrote the screenplay for Kick-Ass 2 (2013). His other directing credits include Never Back Down (2008), Truth or Dare (2018), Fantasy Island (2020) and Imaginary (2024). He also wrote the screenplay and story for Bloodshot (2020). In 2022 he was nominated for a Directors Guild of America award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Television, Commercials and Documentary.
