As I sat there at the drive-thru ATM and stared at the negative account balance, panic set in. Don’t get me wrong; I still love my wife with all of my heart, but I really wish she had shown a bit more restraint and not managed to spend ~$6500 last night. She’s in Las Vegas with her besties, and from what I can gather, it seems that they had quite an evening at a Thunder From Down Under revue. I trust her, though. She posted this photo on her Google+ account to reassure me that it’s just some good old-fashioned fun. She posted several others as well, which I’m sure are innocuous, though I can’t confirm because they are blocked by the CyberNanny adult content filter that she installed for my protection.

Now I know most men would probably balk at the idea of letting their spouse gallivant around Sin City in their best pair of heels and a padded bra, but my wife is nothing short of a saint, so she’s entitled to a little solo blowout. Heck, this is a woman who, every Wednesday morning, lets me eat pancakes topped with syrup and butter. (I sometimes sneak in a similar meal on Sunday, as she usually sleeps over my brother’s house on Saturday night to spend time with our nieces and nephews.) If I curb my cravings and skip the butter, I am promptly rewarded with permission to view the SportsCenter Top 10 Plays (numbers 10 through 4) on the small TV.

While I’m more than willing to forgive, I’m no pushover, so my wife will certainly be hearing about this latest financial boo-boo. She knows my situation. Back in ’08, my bank raided my checking account to help cover their staggering mortgage losses. They assured me that such oddly drastic measures were provisioned for under Bush’s TARP plan; I’m a patriot, so I didn’t complain. However, this led to quite the pickle a few weeks later. As part of a truce deal with the neighborhood youths who made a habit out of throwing large rocks through my bedroom windows, I offered to provide them with full-size 100 Grand candy bars every Halloween. In ’08 though, my depleted funds simply made that impossible, so I tried to sneak by with the fun-size variety.

No dice. Now, every morning before work, when I hop on my bicycle to trek to the bus stop, I have two choices. I either pay the awaiting children ten dollars each, or just make a break for it, and while at work put in a call to State Farm to let them know they will likely be receiving a claim that evening for another act of domestic terrorism perpetrated against my formerly beautiful home.

While I usually take the safe option and just pay up, I didn’t have time for those formalities today. I overslept, and if I missed the bus I would not have time to pick up donuts for the office, which has been my responsibility for the past eleven years. I go to Krispy Kreme first, and then Dunkin Donuts, as the new interns prefer the latter’s coffee. Needing to make time, I burst out the front door on my Huffy, as the kids chased me down with reckless abandon. I finally managed to pull away and, with my tie flapping in the breeze over my shoulder, turned around to blow a mocking kiss at my pursuers. But then, just moments later, a horrifying realization… I had forgotten my helmet. There was no way I could risk travelling the remaining 1.5 blocks to the bus stop without proper cranial protection. I needed to return home, but of course I would now need ample funds to hopefully calm the tempers of the angst-ridden adolescents patrolling my driveway. I choked on the exhaust fumes of a Jeep Liberty for nine minutes in the ATM queue before finally shuffling forward to enter my mother-in-law’s birthday into the PIN pad.

You can understand my hesitance to view a film about hyper-violent juveniles after the beatdown I received upon returning home this morning, but my dueling confidant insisted. He arrived at the hospital in his flatbed pickup, and tossed me and my full body cast into the back. I managed to get through Kick-Ass 2, though for much of the runtime I was distracted by the popcorn being tossed by various patrons at my gaping mouth, immobilized by multiple jaw fractures. And those intermittent distractions were more than welcome, else I don’t think I could have gotten through 90 minutes of Christopher Mintz-Plasse, aka McLovin, somehow dominating screentime in a film also starring Jim Carrey and Donald Faison. McLovin portrays The M*therf**ker, the bratty rich kid turned self-proclaimed world’s most evil super-villain, intent on avenging his father’s death via assassination of the movie’s eponymous faux-superhero. It isn’t too difficult to comprehend his level of annoying-ness on display here. Simply picture that crackly-voiced, awkward, unlikeable teen from Superbad, but now with a pathetic attempt at facial hair and wildly misplaced thespianic swagger, angrily screaming non-stop at every other character that passes through the frame, for the whole damn movie. I’ve now contemplated murder twice in my life: on McLovin’s third line of dialogue in Kick-Ass 2, and when my co-worker refused to trade me Jaromír Jágr in our Eastern Conference fantasy hockey roto league.

Kick-Ass 2 follows the exploits of spoiled suburban white kids who weren’t ambitious enough to make the JV basketball practice squad, instead pretending to be superheroes to justify going through another day without slitting their wrists. It’s a cinematic wet dream for any former/current high school student with zero grit and couldn’t handle it when one of their classmates laughed at them for missing a belt loop on their khaki shorts three weeks ago. (Black inner city kids dealing with actual “bullying”, i.e. getting shot at, won’t find this film nearly as compelling… it’s a whites-only movie.) Why focus on building a more fortified sense of self when you could just fantasize about inducing vomiting and explosive diarrhea in your school’s obnoxious queen bee, as exhibited in wonderful detail in this flick.

Kick-Ass 2 is all about attitude. It’s a rare film in that it tries really hard to be really cool, and usually is. It’s nothing but fast-talking teens spewing wildly offensive dialogue with sophistication and incisiveness well beyond their years, coupled with fast-paced, super-violent action sequences invariably sound-tracked with fun-loving rock tunes to keep you from taking the excessive bloodshed too seriously. While the film’s template is spectacular, the script with which they filled in the blanks is unfortunately quite mediocre. The environment of Kick-Ass 2, chock full of irreverent teens, is ripe for zinger after zinger. However, there just aren’t enough good jokes to fill out the runtime, so the dialogue quickly becomes mundane, sprinkled with random curse words in a failed attempt to liven things up.

In concentrating so hard on the “cool” factor, the writers forgot to come up with a plot. There’s nothing moving the story along, which is ok when you’re being wildly entertained by these ridiculously hip juveniles. However, the best stuff is decidedly front-loaded, so when the general quality of the scenes drops from an A- to a C+ about halfway through the movie, and there’s nothing going on, it starts to drag terribly. There’s always the prospect of the eventual and inevitable climactic clash between McLovin’s evil gang and the good-guy superheroes, but there’s no reason to think that we’re moving toward that other than there’s simply no other way to end the movie.

The indisputable star of Kick-Ass 2 is Chloë Moretz, playing the bright-eyed high school freshman/ martial arts extraordinaire, Hit Girl. In an otherwise middling movie, her performance alone is probably enough to make it worth a watch. Moretz is freakishly gifted, a prodigy if there ever was one, and besides Carrey, who doesn’t do much here, she is miles ahead of anyone else acting-wise. Though she surely will, there’s no need for her to develop her talents any further; this is already a superstar-level performance. Hit Girl is so enjoyable to watch not only because of the inspired portrayal, but also because she possesses a worldly intelligence that lends her a charm, a charm at once both innocent and psychotic, that is lacking in all of the other characters. While her teenage peers talk a big game, they are still ultimately just stupid teenagers. Yet, for some reason, Hit Girl is completely absent for massive chunks of the movie. Instead, we’re forced to watch the benchwarming characters/actors attempt to round out a mediocre ensemble cast while the clear alpha dog chills out in the locker room.

The formula for the inevitable Kick-Ass 3 should be simple: Put Moretz on screen for 90 minutes, cursing like a sailor, occasionally slitting the windpipe of a baddie. That’s more than sufficient. I suspect her odd lack of screentime in this movie may have to do with child labor laws preventing her from working long days. So, wait til her eighteenth birthday, and then start shooting #3 ASAP. I’ve already circled the date in red marker on my 2015 calendar, and posted the image on Facebook, with the caption “Chloë Moretz legal… soooo excited.” For some reason it’s getting a ton of unlikes from my friends, pending or otherwise. Whatever, they must not have an eye for talent like I do, so I guess I’ll be at the Kick-Ass 3 premiere all by my lonesome.