Film Trailer | Kick-Ass 2

With Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and The Wolverine all scheduled for release in the coming months, the summer of 2013 is stacked with eagerly anticipated superhero movies for global audiences’ viewing pleasure. If the aforementioned blockbusters aren’t quite what you’re looking for, however, Jeff Wadlow’s Kick-Ass 2 (2013) – the sequel to Matthew Vaughn’s outrageously popular original, Kick-Ass (2010) – is set to offer an alternative to the spandex-clad genre with another helping of ultra-violent superhero satire. Today, Universal Pictures officially unveiled an official poster to go along with a US red band trailer, and you can check out all the foul-mouthed goodness at the bottom of this post.

Picking off from where its predecessor concluded, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) and Mindy Macready (Chloë Grace Moretz) are still fighting the good fight as Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl respectively, all the while trying to get used to high-school life. Whilst their heroic endeavours have inspired a wave of new crime-fighters, including Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey) and Doctor Gravity (Donald Faison), Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) – who has rebranded himself ‘The Mother Fucker’ – is assembling a team of villains to take vengeance on Kick-Ass for the murder of his father.

To borrow a phrase from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), there certainly seems to be a theme of ‘escalation’ at work here as the city reacts to the emergence of heroes on its streets, from the police to the villains. Aside from the customary glimpses of action and well-timed humour, the trailer also gives us a great look at newcomer to the franchise Carrey, who is clearly enjoying himself in a role which is very different to what we’ve seen him in previously.

On the basis of this footage, Wadlow was a deft choice to replace the departing Vaughn as director, with the tone and style of the original very much intact. In addition to Johnson, Moretz and Mintz-Plasse, Lyndsey Fonseca and Clark Duke also return, whilst John Leguizamo rounds out the cast.

This article was originally published at Cine-Vue.