Kick-Ass 2

In Jeff Wadlow’s 2013 sequel Dave joins Justice Forever, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes, a former mob enforcer turned born again Christian, while Mindy hangs up the cape for the school dance squad and walks into a prank staged by the popular girls. The two stories never share a tone. The costumed plot is comic book pastiche, the Mindy half is a straight high school movie, and it parks the vigilante story for long stretches. The comic’s most notorious scene is rewritten into a joke: instead of Katie’s gang rape, the film sends the villain after Night Bitch and lets the assault fail on his inability to perform. Wadlow put the change down to working with real people rather than drawings. Jim Carrey played the Colonel, then on 23 June 2013, two months before release, cited Sandy Hook and said he could not support that level of violence; Mark Millar, who wrote the comic, replied that the screenplay had been unchanged for eighteen months. Ontario stood in for New York. Made for 28 million dollars, it finished on 60.8 million worldwide against the first film’s 96.2 million. A good fit if you can take the dance squad thread suspending the costumed plot. Not for anyone unwilling to watch a scene built as horror in print become an impotence gag.