Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass arrived in 2010, long before the R-rated comic book adaptation had become as popular as it is now thanks to the success of Deadpool, Logan and Joker, but it still quickly gained cult status. The infectiously irreverent, violent and foul-mouthed movie scored strong reviews from critics and earned close to $100 million at the box office on a $28 million budget, with solid home video sales after the fact playing a huge part in getting a sequel made.
Unfortunately, though, Kick-Ass 2 was a damp squib. Jeff Wadlow replaced Vaughn behind the camera and simply couldn’t repeat the tricks that made the first installment so eminently enjoyable, and both the violence and humor were excessive just for the sake of it, missing the point of the opener using its heightened reality to poke fun at and subvert the tropes of the genre.
The most memorable thing about Kick-Ass 2 isn’t even anything that happened on screen, but rather star Jim Carrey publicly disowning the movie and refusing to promote it. In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the actor released a statement saying he couldn’t support the project in good conscience given its glorification and depiction of violence.
According to Looper, in fact, he regretted filming one moment in particular. However, despite the fact that the outlet titles their article “The Scene In Kick-Ass 2 That Jim Carrey Regretted Filming,” they don’t specify which one it was, simply saying that his more violent scenes left him “with deep feelings of regret shortly after the cameras stopped rolling.”
We can presume, then, that it was one of the more R-rated moments that he regretted most, but in any case, co-star Chloe Grace-Moretz blasted Carrey’s decision to distance himself from the flick, creating this weird situation where an established A-lister was being called out by a teenager for refusing to distinguish between real life and the fictional goings on of Kick-Ass 2. But it didn’t matter much in the end anyway when the sequel was largely dismissed by critics and flopped hard in its theatrical run by just about making it past $60 million, despite Carrey’s denouncement creating an added layer of intrigue surrounding the content.
