For a movie that seems interested in examining the difference between comic book escapism and the repercussions of real-life violence, Kick-Ass 2 is virtually empty of consequences. Where Matthew Vaughn’s 2010 original transplanted a superhero origin story into a marginally realistic world, Jeff Wadlow’s follow-up does the opposite, taking pajama-clad wannabes and catapulting them into a universe where merciless beatings produce minimal bruises, and devastating losses are fodder for mythic origin stories. In overestimating the appeal of its central characters and underdeveloping the emotional substance of its secondary ones, Kick-Ass 2 feels fatally miscalculated, a would-be genre deconstruction that explains way too much without understanding at all what it wants to say.