Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

The moment an eleven year old Chloe Grace Moretz dropped the c-word twenty minutes in was the moment the first Kick-Ass announced its intention to ruffle a few feathers. It was a glorious, blood-spattered mess of a film, which managed to be both completely ridiculous and perfectly ironic. What made it appeal to a wide audience and not just the niche it seemed to cultivate was the fact that it knew exactly what it was doing. Despite the veneer of chaos, it was extremely well crafted.

What its follow up lacks is this consummate self-awareness. There is a painful absence of direction from the opening scene, which recalls a classic exchange from its predecessor but lacks the spark of originality that first made it shocking. From this moment on, there is a sense that Jeff Wadlow is trying to recreate the formula that was so successful first time round, only now things are a little stale. The cast is older, the jokes less well judged, and the thoughtful touches that gave the original its warmth have been replaced by a brash surface appeal. It's loud; it's bloody, but there's no depth to be found in its trashy reconstructions.

It's not quite all bad news. Moretz remains the best thing about the franchise and her now adolescent Hit Girl is every bit as outrageously charismatic as before. This might actually be part of the problem: she has really grown into her character, making the rest of the cast sound even more like tired repetitions of something that once worked so well. Nonetheless, she and Aaron Taylor Johnson retain a powerful dynamic and the moments they occupy the screen together are amongst the most sincere. Some critics have scoffed at the high school narrative that sees Hit Girl transported into a pseudo Mean Girls set-up, where her foes are bitchy cheerleaders and vapid jocks. This might have been really effective if the director had been a little more confident in the uncompromising tone Kick Ass took the first time round. Where there would originally have been carnage, now there's vomit, and it's all a bit Pitch Perfect where it was previously Pulp Fiction.

In terms of new additions, Jim Carrey has courted controversy by publicly distancing himself from the film on the grounds that it is too violent. It was a strange move on his part, given that he could never have been in any doubt about the gore content, but his grisly anti Captain America is actually an interesting figure and it would have been nice to see a little more of him before he was summarily dispatched. That's the thing about this sequel: it includes the good bits in its turnover and so we lose the coherence and comedy, resulting in something a bit gross and misshapen. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, now the world's first 'super-villain,' has become a sadistic caricature overlaid with Oedipal anxieties and even he looks a bit sheepish when that rape joke falls ironically flat. It's the worst moment of a disappointing instalment and it leaves a particularly bad taste.

As a big fan of its predecessor I had high hopes for this film. But it has unfortunately become the victim of its own success, forgetting the punchline of the joke it told first.