Kick Ass 2 thinks that people liked Kick Ass because it had violence and swearing and that the worst offender was a little girl…

Unfortunately, what it doesn’t realise is that while people might point to those things, they actually liked Kick Ass because it was a tightly scripted, cleverly constructed original spin on a tired concept. Kick Ass 2 is none of those things, but it does have violence and swearing.

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Some impossible period of time has passed since the last movie so that Aaron Taylor Johnson‘s, Dave (aka: Kick Ass), and Chloe Grace Moretz‘s Mindy (aka: Hit Girl) now seem to be nearly the same age. Dave looks to be exactly the same age, but Mindy is a good 2 or 3 years older. Christopher Mintz-Plasse‘s Red Mist is in the process of transforming into a villain called ‘The Motherfucker’ to take revenge on Kick Ass for firing his Dad off a building with a rocket launcher in the last movie.

There are WAY too many actors with three names in this movie, in my opinion.

Dave wants to keep being Kick Ass, so figures he needs to actually get good at fighting and stuff. Meanwhile Mindy decides she must stop being Hit Girl, giving this movie a bad case of The Incredible Hulk disease, whereby there is a direct conflict between what the audience wants (The Hulk, or in this case Hit Girl), and what the main character wants (which is not to become The Hulk or Hit Girl). It creates a weird tension. This is made worse by giving Mindy an endlessly horrible Mean Girls style subplot that climaxes half way through the movie with some explosive toilet humour and is promptly forgotten.

Kick Ass 2 has a plot, but it’s barely worth mentioning…

Basically, Kick Ass joins a team of heroes, including Jim Carrey, who is great in what amounts to an extended cameo. Eventually, after the movie is over half way through, an almost laughably half-assed evil plot emerges that is completely devoid of energy and tension. It serves only as a catalyst for a climax that seemed to me to consist of a bunch of mentally ill losers murdering each other.

I’m sorry, that sounds really mean. I didn’t completely hate this.

There were individual scenes and characters that I really liked – particularly Mother Russia, this gigantic, chiselled blonde henchwoman. She was a blast. I wanted to like it, but I couldnt get past the terrible plotting, awful sublots and sloppy pacing.

New director Jaff Wadlow has come up with a poorly written and poorly made movie, in direct contrast to Matthew Vaughn’s original. Don’t waste your time with it.

More ‘Big Screen’ reviews from Sam Clark