Jeff Wadlow

New writer-director Wadlow (Never Back Down) makes one severe misstep with this sequel to Matthew Vaughn's snappy 2010 Kick-Ass: he loses the irony. Now everything is played for goofy laughs and indulgent grisliness. There's no longer any subtext, nothing original in the structure or premise and a clear fear of being politically incorrect. Even so, it's an entertaining romp with a steady stream of funny gags.

After the craziness of the first film, Dave (Taylor-Johnson) has hung up his Kick-Ass costume and is trying to be a regular teen at school, but he's jealous of Mindy (Moretz) secretly carrying on her training as Hit Girl. So he asks her to team up and teach him some new tricks. But when her guardian (Chestnut) finds out, she promises to give up the violence and go back to school. Now Dave has to find a new partner, so he joins a lively team of underground heroes led by the gung-ho Captain Stars and Stripes (Carrey). But Dave's old nemesis Chris (Mintz-Plasse) still wants to avenge his father's death, so he abandons his dodgy heroic alter-ego Red Mist and instead becomes a supervillain called The Mother F**ker, with his own butler-assistant (Leguizamo) and a crew of minions.

Wadlow briskly leaps from one action set-piece to the next, and each scene has a witty sense of humour about it, even if the extreme violence is played for rather glamorised fun rather than the shock-value of the first film. Through everything, the dialog is packed with amusing lines that keep us laughing. And Mindy's parallel plot has its moments as well, throwing her in with the school's mean girls, who clearly don't know who they're messing with. Moretz plays Mindy so well that she makes everyone else feel scruffy and simplistic by comparison. Carrey's muscled meathead is a startlingly against-type role that strangely refuses to go anywhere. But Glen is rivetingly sharp in one key scene.

Continue reading: Kick-Ass 2 Review

Kids and mom end up holed up in the car as the lions prowl outside, still hungry. To make matters worse, grating and bratty teenage sis (Carly Schroeder) hates the stepmom and blames her for everything when she isn't listening to her iPod. Gosh! Why can't the lions just leave her alone!? Finally they spot the keys outside, and mom makes a run for it. Five seconds later she's wrecked the car completely. Eventually natives wander by and help them. Meanwhile dad has hired a ranger to search for the missing car.

Continue reading: Prey Review

The movie concerns a group of bored, privileged high school students at a private school. This particular group has a love for games about lying, which they come together to play once a week. All is hunky dory in their group until their ringleader Dodger (Lindy Booth) brings in an outsider named Owen (Julian Morris), a British newbie who got kicked out of his last school for drug possession and for getting a bit too close to the headmaster's daughter. In a flash of creativity, the group cooks up one big lie for the entire school to fall into, involving the murder of a local townie. The lie is simple: A serial killer called The Wolf is terrorizing campus and will strike again when the full moon is out. Suddenly, strange messages show up, people's rooms are wrecked, and people are running for their lives away from a person dressed to fit the description of The Wolf.

Continue reading: Cry_wolf Review