The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?

Like its predecessor, All Saints Day will, if nothing else, be a cult item for Roman Catholic schoolboys; the next sequel, blatantly set up, should arrive no later than 2019.

The only truly ugly side to this self-consciously grimy movie is the streak of Neanderthal humor. Operatic overacting is funny. Racist and homophobic jokes? Not so much.

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

John Woo outgrew stylizing movies like this in the '90s, but Duffy is still chasing his perfect slide-and-shoot, except now with more self-satisfied posturing, awkward pop-culture referencing, casual homophobia and racism, and the most vulgar co-opting of religious iconography this side of Dan Brown.