The trailer for Jeff Wadlow’s “Kick Ass 2” has been released and it’s pretty great. The upcoming film is the sequel to 2010’s “Kick Ass” which was a semi grounded take on the superhero genre wherein a young comic book fan called Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) became a real life costumed crime fighter. Dave’s quest was pretty much an embarrassing failure until he encountered and was trained by lethal masked avengers Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) and upped his game considerable.
The original was a minor hit, largely because of co-writer/director Matthew Vaughan’s ultra-violent take on the relatively staid genre tropes that have been employed since Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film and the shock of seeing the sweet looking Moretz spew foul-mouthed invective and murder with childish abandon. The new film seems to capitalize on the earlier film’s strengths while doing away with its pretense that anything about a high school kid attacking hardened criminals and not immediately dying is in any way realistic.
“Kick Ass 2” features a gun fight on a moving vehicle, a RPG attack at a funeral, a curiously accented Jim Carrey as a psychotic superhero called Colonel Stars and Stripes, a deeply painful looking dog bite, a piss take one of those irritating scenes where a hero’s loved one tries to convince him to get up the mask even though it’s the single best thing to ever happen to that person, and lots of profanity. All in all it looks to be a lot of fun, even though writer/director Wadlow has a pretty uneven resume (his debut 2005 “Cry Wolf” was great but his 2008 follow-up “Never Back Down” was abysmal.)
For good or ill, “Kick Ass 2” hits Cleveland area theaters on August 13, 2013.
Mario McKellop has written about film on Examiner for the last three years and can be reached directly at mmckellop@hotmail.com
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