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| Writer-director Jeff Wadlow establishes a premise and follows it without compromise, but the trail leads to a very ugly place. In the end, the journey wasn't really worth it. |
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| (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle) |
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| It revels in carnage while lacking the visual style and gleeful humor of the original. |
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| (Claudia Puig, USA Today) |
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| It apparently endorses vigilantism, and its attitude toward violence seems to be that it's mostly hilarious but sometimes it's supposed to make us feel sad about what an awful waste it is. |
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| (Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press) |
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| There isn't anything good to say about Kick-Ass 2, the even more witless, mirthless follow-up to Kick-Ass. |
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| (Manohla Dargis, New York Times) |
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| Morally repugnant. |
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| (Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews) |
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| A witless, mean-spirited sequel, Kick-Ass 2 has the emotional maturity of an arrested 12-year-old and the ethical compass of a turnip. |
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| (Ty Burr, Boston Globe) |
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| A juvenile comedy of excess, in which skewering adolescent power fantasies looks an awful lot like indulging in them. |
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| (A.A. Dowd, The Onion) |
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| Crass and affected, preferring to snicker instead of recognize that kids wielding guns is a troubling thing and amateurs hunting down bad guys has moral and physical consequences. |
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| (Matt Pais, RedEye) |
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| The word that came to mind as I walked out of Kick-Ass 2 was "vomitous." The best thing that can be said about it is that it's not in 3D. That's not nearly enough. |
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| (Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine) |
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| Where original director Matthew Vaughn and writer Jane Goldman somehow managed to tread a delicate tightrope between indulging fanboy fantasies and sending them up, sequel writer-director Jeff Wadlow falls off the rope. |
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| (Jason Best, Movie Talk) |
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| Mostly, this flick appears to be about getting two posses of masked idiots into one big room so they could fight it out, heroes versus villains, like a Comic-Con cosplay event gone horribly wrong. What I don’t get is this: all these people in mask and capes mostly don’t know one another and don’t know which allegedly badass costume indicates good and which evil, so how, in the midst of the melee that Wadlow thinks is awesome is mostly just a mess, does anyone know whom they should be beating the crap out of? |
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| (MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher) |
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| The tone of of Jeff Wadlow's sequel flails about like a bar room drunk in a brawl - despite hitting out in all directions, very few of its punches strike their target. None of these plotlines hang together, in fact, it's almost as though they don't want to be seen in the same room. Just as one scene seems to be making a vague attempt to say something about the nature of vigilantism and it not being a good idea, another idea muscles in, sticks its tongue out and bares its backside. Next, we see going-for-broke punch-ups finding themselves pushed into a corner by a sudden break-out of adult/teenager bonding. And that's before we get to the extreme misfire of a 'joke' concerning threatened rape. It's as though Wadlow thinks that by going for broke in every department, his film will win the day. Instead, it feels like an adolescent superhero-wannabe trying on every mask in the shop without settling on any of them. |
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| (Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film) |
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| Ultimately feels rather scattershot and disjointed, perhaps quite simply because it lacks the sheer left-field originality of the original. |
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| (Mark Adams, Screen International) |
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| Focusing on a movie's strengths can be tough for any sequel that fails to live up to the expectation and hype. Kick-Ass 2's idolisation of its predecessor merely compounds this problem. |
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| (Ben Rawson-Jones, Digital Spy) |
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| Carrey makes so negligible an impact on the film that perhaps if he’d kept quiet, no-one would have noticed he was in it. Kick-Ass and his team are battling a spoilt little rich kid called Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), whose father was killed in the first film and who has recast himself as a supervillain with an unprintable name. His acts of villainy range from the usual gorily rendered beatings and stabbings to an attempted rape, which is played for laughs. That may be all the warning you need to give Kick-Ass 2 a wide berth, although the lack of purpose to the scene made me despair rather than its lack of taste. It’s just another worthless skit in a film chock-full of them, cheap rather than nasty and forgotten the moment it passes. Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked. |
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| (Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph) |
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| A very violent film (albeit terrifyingly less violent than the comic book), and while I actually enjoyed the first film, this time around I was kind of sort of offended by it. Not the level of violence in the film — which is what a number of people took umbrage with in the first film — but the amount of it. There are so many action sequences in the film that I quickly become bored by them and by the end was actually annoyed by them. They’re shot with a very shaky camera, very close in, and with a terrible amount of cuts. A number of the sequences are hard to watch simply because the action is so unclear. A cardinal sin for an action film. Additionally, the expository scenes are barely more than filler, carrying us through from one poorly-shot fight to another. We’re not given a single reason to like, care about, or be interested in any of the characters. They’re all selfish or sociopathically detached, or they accidentally killed their mother and are now murdering people dressed in her fetish gear. It’s really just a bunch, “Huff, sigh, who really cares?” To top it off, the film plays all the action straight (or as straight as it can) until the final fight which features one of the most stylized fights since 300—it’s jarring, and the low-level CGI used makes it look like garbage as well as out of place. |
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| (Lord Helmet, This is Infamous) |
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| Kick-Ass 2's violence is no more brutal than the original's, but by attempting to lock the action into the drama of real-life, Wadlow inadvertently adds a layer of grit that makes the carnage less comic and more distasteful. "This is not a comic book", says Kick-Ass. "Real people are going to die tonight". But if it's real, it's horrific. There's a difference between a self-deluding egotist like The Motherfucker being violently offensive ("He's little and he kills – we'll call him Tumour") and Hit Girl - mid-battle - attempting the same thing ("I'm gonna go Saudi Arabia on your ass and cut your hands off"). From the earnest discussions on self-belief to the glorified bloody fight scenes, the real world hits a little too heavy in Wadlow's spirited, but misguided sequel. And the film hits back in turn. After the screening, a promotional poster for the film hangs outside in the foyer. "Kick-Ass 2 … Jim Carrey is Colonel Stars and Stripes", reads the banner. "Aaron Johnson is Kick-Ass" "Christopher Mintz-Plasse is ____________", with The Motherfucker's name blacked out for decency's sake. Out of the cinema, the joke's inappropriate. The tone's too rough to be funny. Kick-Ass 2 suffers from being a little too real. |
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| (Henry Barnes, Guardian) |
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| If you want to hold on to the wishful belief that the filmmakers (a) have the remotest clue what they're doing or (b) have no desire to sexualise Hit Girl, your best bet is probably to give this a miss. Treats every one of its predecessor's faults as a braggable virtue, contains not a single good performance, and pretty much closes the case: a classic example of a sequel taking a movie down more scathingly than its own worst reviews. |
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| (Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph) |
