Horrible Bosses 2 is a movie packed with deja vu. There's a self-referential gag about this in the credit roll, involving a character performing a gross-out act with a toothbrush, as featured in Horrible Bosses, and the line "She must have seen the first movie".

Somehow, this cheerful acknowledgment of repetition rings hollow: it only adds insult to injury. The movie has a few comic moments – there are enough gags, one-liners and set-ups for a trailer – but there's a lot to endure in between.

Horrible Bosses 2 features the further misadventures of Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day), three sketchy gestures towards the comic potential of blundering and male bonding 

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They are variations on a theme; Dale is timid and stupid, Kurt is sleazy and stupid, and Nick is smarter than the other two, but stupid enough to go along with their plans.  

Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx, figures in the first movie, are wheeled back in for one-note cameos. New in the game are Christoph Waltz playing a scumbag in a surprisingly low-key way (compared to Spacey, at any rate). Chris Pine also plays a scumbag, with an air of frantic over-emphasis.

This time, instead of suffering at the hands of horrible bosses, as they did the first time, Nick, Dale and Kurt become bosses themselves, running their own small business. Are they horrible too? Well, they're not great, but that's not where the movie is taking us. That would be too much of a change, or a challenge.

They set up their own company, producing a product of their own invention called a Shower Buddy. (There's something very desultory about this part of the plot: the Buddy feels like the first idea any of the writers thought of, and no one could be bothered to improve on it.)  

The three are exploited by those with power over them. They resort to crime to try to solve their problem. They make a mess of it. There's a new director, Sean Anders, and new writers – this time Anders and John Morris wrote the screenplay, but three of the writers from the first movie have story or character credits. Horrible Bosses 2 is more of the same, yet less.