BOP Review: Kick-Ass 2

As an avid comic book reader, I've rarely - hell, probably never - put down a comic or refused to finish it based off of one scene. That changed whenever I read the second issue of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass 2, the comic that this movie is somewhat loosely based off of. There was a scene in it that I found to be so incredibly tasteless and so unnecessarily cruel that I just decided I'd had enough right then and there, put down the title, and never read any of it's subsequent issues or the sequels that followed - including Kick-Ass 3, currently out, and the Hit-Girl miniseries that the film is also supposedly based off of. For the film adaptation of Kick-Ass 2, which is as much a sequel to the Matthew Vaughn original as it is a straight adaptation of the comic, I'll give it this - unlike my experience reading the source, I never had my "I'm done" moment.

But this film goes a long way to prove that even if you necessarily manage to improve on the source material, that doesn't always make it good.