The element of surprise that gave Matthew Vaughn’s “Kick-Ass” such punch back in 2010 is obviously missing from Jeff Wadlow’s sequel. Unfortunately, so is almost everything else that made its predecessor so absurdly enjoyable, in particular the uncannily calibrated balance between dark comedy and cartoonish violence, to which just a drop of sentimentality was added. In “Kick-Ass 2” the elements are badly juggled, and the result, to butcher Hobbes, is nasty, brutish, but certainly not short.

Wadlow takes up where Vaughn’s film closed—following the triumph of the costumed teen Dave Lezewski calling himself Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the now-orphaned Mindy Macready, aka Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) over the gangland father of Chris D’Amico, aka Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Mindy is now in the care of her dead father’s buddy, Detective Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut), who wants her in school and out of trouble, but she ditches classes to continue her masked career. Dave begs her to train him so they can become a team, and she agrees, but is soon sidelined when Marcus finds out about her extracurricular activities and grounds her.

Here the script unwisely veers in two directions. In one, Mindy, craving acceptance as a normal freshman, falls into the orbit of campus mean girl Brooke (Claudia Lee)—something you know won’t end well. In the other, Dave, seeking companionship on his rounds, joins a group of costumed vigilantes headed by Captain Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey) and including, among others, Dave’s pal Marty (Clark Duke). Meanwhile Chris, determined to kill Kick-Ass, takes on the new persona of The Motherfu****, and with the help of his aide Julio (John Leguizamo), forms an army of super-villains, the most notable member of which is an Amazonian he calls Mother Russia (Olga Kurkulina). Eventually, of course, Hit Girl returns to action, but not before both Captain Stars and Stripes and Dave’s father (Garrett M. Brown) have met untimely ends at the hands of Chris’s crew.

All three major characters in “Kick-Ass 2” suffer the loss of their fathers and are supposedly driven by the fact, but there’s no depth to that part of the story. Instead Wadlow, whose only previous features were the awful slasher flick “Cry Wolf” (2005) and the numbskull teen martial-arts movie “Never Back Down” (2008), concentrates on crummy gross-out comedy and, in particular, bloody action sequences. So we get repeated scenes involving a device that induces vomit-causing nausea and diarrhea simultaneously (the result of which is shown quite graphically, to the delight of yahoos in the audience) and lots of raunchy situations (including a moment in Dave’s bedroom that’s a rip-off of “American Pie”) and potty-mouth language. More often, however, Wadlow indulges his predisposition for heavy-handed violence, including a big confrontation in D’Amico’s lair, which among other things features a shark in a huge aquarium. (Needless to say, in his own way he follows Chekov’s dictum about the gun shown in the first act having to be used by the end. You know that shark’s going to bite before the movie’s over.)

The original “Kick-Ass” melded comedy and action too, but did so skillfully, creating a sense of euphoria rather than disgust. This sequel doesn’t manage a similar balance. The comedy is mostly unpleasant or even disgusting, and the violence repeatedly goes over the line to become repulsive. Simply put, its predecessor was almost shamefully giddy fun. By comparison Wadlow’s picture is simply shameful.

To be sure, Johnson remains an affable fellow, and though Moretz has to play the angst-ridden teen too much, she still comes across when in Hit Girl mode. Mintz-Plasse, by contrast, is tediously shrill, though to be fair the material he’s stuck with is awful; but as long as he’s around, Leguizamo lightens his scenes somewhat, particularly in one of the movie’s rare funny bits when he objects to some of the names D’Amico is giving to members of his gang. Chestnut is totally wasted in a useless role, and Duke gets little to do. Technically the movie’s no better than okay, with some action sequences—like a battle between Mother Russia and NYPD patrol cops—looking especially ragged.

As for Carrey, he gives a surly, humorless one-note performance. Of course, he’s also made post-production complaints about the level of violence in the movie. One might cattily observe that it’s nothing compared to the violence Carrey has done to filmgoers with some of his more atrocious flicks. But you have to admit that in this instance he has a point. Vaughn managed both the comedy and the action cleverly in “Kick-Ass.” In this movie, Wadlow shows no such skill. It makes you wonder whether Vaughn, who served as one of the producers, might have chosen him simply to show how much defter he was by comparison.