Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass may not have been as majestically portentous as Zack Snyder's similarly themed Watchmen, but it satirised its subject with equal intelligence and a hipper sense of humour. Arriving three years ago with perfect timing to offset the slow descent into blandness of Hollywood superhero flicks, it also avoided slipping into spoof territory. Finally, it succeeded in really annoying Daily Mail readers, who got all Mary Whitehouse over 12-year-old Chloë Moretz's turn as a potty-mouthed, frighteningly lethal crime fighter.

With Vaughn stepping back to a producer's role, little-known film-maker Jeff Wadlow takes on writing and directing duties for Kick-Ass 2, the first trailer for which has just hit the web. Moretz returns as purple-tressed, pint-sized killer Hit Girl, with Britain's Aaron Taylor-Johnson also stepping back into Kick-Ass's distinctive homemade costume. Those who have read Mark Millar's comic book will know that in the sequel Christopher Mintz-Plasse graduates from scheming crimefighter Red Mist to the world's first real supervillain, The Motherfucker, following the death of his gangster dad Frank D'Amico at the hands of Kick-Ass. With Nicolas Cage's Batman-like Big Daddy also consigned to superhero heaven in the first film, Jim Carrey takes the role of unhinged crimefighter as Colonel Stars and Stripes. Fittingly for the post-Avengers zeitgeist, he's the leader of superhero ensemble Justice Forever.

The original film stood out for its Quentin Tarantino-like penchant for graphic violence, in stark contrast to the more restrained Sam Raimi Spider-Man films from which it borrowed much of its tone. An amusing segue, in which Stars and Stripes (in what could be a bravura Carrey performance, consigning all memories of his terrible Riddler to history) encourages a pitbull to gnaw on a bad guy's nether regions, hints there will no let-up this time around.

Gratifyingly, there's no graduation to sharper costumes: Kick-Ass and Hit Girl still look like last-minute invitees to a superhero-themed fancy dress party, while The Motherfucker resembles the awkward detritus of amateur night at fetish club Torture Garden. Yet by the looks of the trailer, Kick-Ass 2 will have to tread carefully to avoid aping the films it riffs on too closely. Taylor-Johnson, in particular, has buffed up so much that Dave Lizewski's geeky-teen-out-to-take-on-the-bad-guys schtick might just have a little less resonance this time around, while Moretz is a lot less shocking as a 15-year-old baby-faced killer. Might Wadlow, without the guiding hands of Vaughn and Kick-Ass co-screenwriter Jane Goldman, have given us a movie that is less a coy, postmodern riff on the current fascination for superheroes than … well, just an extremely violent comic-book film?

Millar's genius in the comic was to work out that Watchmen creator Alan Moore got it all wrong: if superheroes existed in the real world, they would not be evil geniuses, god-like freaks of nature or rich men channelling their fortunes into heroic deeds – but hapless teenage fanboys desperate to succeed with the opposite sex. The problem for Kick-Ass 2 is that the slicker it becomes, the more it risks losing the joyous veneer of half-baked heroism that helped make the first film so singularly, enjoyably offbeat.

We'll have to wait until 19 July in the UK and 16 August in the US to find out if Wadlow has avoided that particular trap. Do you expect Kick-Ass 2 to shake things up as radically as its predecessor? Or should the sequel have come out two years ago when Moretz was still cute as a button and Taylor-Johnson didn't look ripped enough to take out Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman with one arm tied behind his back?