Marvel’s likeable superhero comedy Guardians of the Galaxy is back for amiable and goofy volume number two, and its beefy-yet-quirky space hero and team leader Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt, duly has a second volume of that Awesome Mixtape on the Sony Walkman he has on him at all times.

It’s the same combination of cartoony action and intergalactic screwball with some ambient production design recalling the photorealist sci-fi imagery of Roger Dean or Chris Foss in a bygone age, creating a visual sense of earnestness to offset the archly retro pop culture gags. Again, it has its own supercharged Heart FM playlist of 70s and 80s music. The early 70s track Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass is laid on the soundtrack almost ecstatically in the opening sequence, and some tongue-in-cheek dialogue later invokes it as the greatest piece of music ever to have emerged from Planet Earth. This film rattles along and there’s a lot to enjoy, but there’s a weird air of pointlessness, almost plotlessness to this sequel.

The old gang are still together: as well as Quill, there is the green-faced Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana, and the mighty, slab-like Drax, played by Dave Bautista. Vin Diesel provides the voice of Baby Groot, and Bradley Cooper voices the foxy, weaselly figure of Rocket; he is the louche and disreputable character whose job is to get the group into trouble. The Guardians get into some serious trouble pinching some energy sources from a certain golden empress named Ayesha, very amusingly played by Elizabeth Debicki. She has a haughty, queenly manner and an air of frozen displeasure whenever one of her many courtiers make a mess of things: Debicki’s Ayesha would be a great returning character, and on the strength of this Debicki would be strong casting in any new film about Elizabeth I, stealing Cate Blanchett’s crown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Me myself and I ... Kurt Russell as Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. Photograph: © Marvel Studios 2017

The ensuing cosmic affray brings Quill and the Guardians back into contact with Yondu (Michael Rooker), the hated freebooter who kidnapped Quill from Planet Earth when he was a child, and with Gamora’s fanatically driven and malevolent sister, Nebula, played by Karen Gillan. But most pointedly of all, there is a new character, worryingly named Ego, played by Kurt Russell, whose “prequel” relationship with Quill is signalled pretty clearly in the opening scene. There is something unsettling in his buttery tan and bouffant splendour as a digitised young man and in the gravitas of his facial hair in the present day: he is a character with no small opinion of himself.

There are, once again, some funny lines, very often given to Drax, who has a way of oversharing. Pom Clementieff is very entertaining in the role of Mantis, a helpmeet of Ego; she has the gift of being an empath, someone who can intuit how someone else is feeling by laying hands on them, but is in every other fantastically naive and un-insightful about the way human beings behave.

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Ego himself introduces some apparently huge Freudian issues to the film, which on paper would seem to take the film’s emotional impact up a notch or two. But they are dealt with insouciantly, even flippantly – far more so than in something like Star Wars or Superman. That’s in keeping of course, with the distinctive comic flavour of this franchise, but the revelations about Quill’s background just zing and ping around with the same pinball-velocity as everything else in the film. It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.