Have you had enough violent mayhem recently? I sometimes fancy that the diet of the stuff the cinema feeds us – generous by any standard – is more likely to benumb our instincts than inflame them.
People worry about films provoking “copycat violence”, but it seems the only ones who really commit to the copying are other film-makers. Oh yeah, loved that fight sequence – let’s do a version of it in our next one! And so the process starts to feed on itself and the action looks very like something we saw the other week – same move, same blood-spatter, same throwaway quip, almost. The audience yawns, and drifts on to the next round of brutal fantasies.In 2010, Kick-Ass had the smart idea of collapsing the distance between fantasy and reality. What if the masked superhero who fearlessly jumped into a streetfight was, er, us? Or, someone like us – Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), for instance, a nerdy high-schooler fed up with being invisible to girls. Dave’s solution was to don a wetsuit (green with yellow trim) and announce himself to the world as “Kick-Ass”, a have-a-go hero on a mission to clean up the town. And, of course, the only ass that got kicked was his own – the thugs he took on were beefy and vicious and put him in hospital. The film’s real talent was another masked crusader called Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a pint-size terror with the deadly reflexes of a ninja and the language of a Premiership footballer. You messed with her at your peril.Three years on, and Kick-Ass 2 makes its inevitable appearance. Dave’s pretty much the same, a gangly mophead in granny spectacles, less kick-ass than stuck-on-his-ass. Still chafing at his underdog leash, he puppyishly seeks out his old friend Mindy Macready, aka Hit-Girl, with a view to forming a partnership, “like Batman and Robin”. After some hesitation (“No one wants to be Robin, Dave”), she eventually agrees to put him through crimefighter school, weights, pull-ups, target practice with himself as the target, that sort of thing.Mindy, now 14 years old, has a few issues of her own. Now an orphan, she’s in the kindly guardianship of her old man’s former police partner Marcus (Morris Chestnut), who has put the kibosh on her crime-busting routines. No more killing people – and no more swearing, either. Worse, she’s now in first year at high school, where girls are mean and boys are an ordeal: of her first date she says, “Reminds me of the first time Daddy sent me into a crack den with just a pen-knife.This topsy-turvy world is pretty much a continuation of the scenario which Matthew Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman created in Kick-Ass. (It was based on the comic books by Mark Millar and John S Romita Jr.) Jeff Wadlow, who writes and directs this sequel, is perfectly competent without ever threatening to strike the wild unpredictable notes of the first movie. His is a somewhat nervous approach, going for volume rather than depth.