Having directed the dire Hollywood film 2018’s Tomb Raider, Norwegian film director Roar Uthaug has remained in his home country to continue his folklore yarn that he started with 2022’s Troll.

This sees a number of that original cast - including the troll - return, but the number 2 in the film’s title hints at more to come.

Still in her remote cabin in Norway is Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann). She gets a visitor out of the blue, her old friend Andreas (Kim Falck).

He isn’t dropping by just for a chat, he has some news that he thinks she will be intrigued by. He dangles enough information without tell her the full story, but it’s enough to get her hooked.

He takes her to an underground lab, where she is confronted by something that she can’t believe her eyes – another troll in the flesh.

He’s standing tall, but thankfully in hibernation, whilst all the scientists are there doing tests. They have no idea how he would react if he were awake, so it’s good for everyone concerned he’s in a very deep sleep.

Nora is just too inquisitive, considering her past with the troll whose path she crossed, and sneaks closer to this captured one, to get a closer look.

She does a bit more than that, in actually waking the beast from his slumber, and he’s not in the best of moods.

The troll escapes, eating a few of the staff there, which indicates it’s not keen with making friends with humans.

So Nora and Andreas reunite with soldier Kriss (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) to come up with a plan to bring it down. Nora soon realises that they may need more help, of a troll variety...

Uthaug has played it safe with this sequel, shovelling more of the same in the snowy locale. His creative drive comes up with the notion of what could be better than one troll – two!

The result is a lame Kong-zilla style narrative, which doesn’t have the same level of charm as the first.

Because of the remote locale, there’s not a lot of destruction that can be done, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise to have the trolls ending up throwing snowballs at one another, which would have at least been entertaining.

The human cast do their best, carrying the emotional weight with their reunion, but even then the director telegraphs the narrative for one character within minutes of them being on screen, lacking any kind of subtlety of what’s to come.

And there’s also the overly clunky method that Nora woke the troll in the first place, and without affecting her conscience in any way at all.

What’s worse is that Uthaug hints at a third film with a post-credit scene, which may give him the ability to take the film’s premise to a whole other level of generic-ness. Troll Vs Frosty the Snowman anyone?

Troll 2 is the kind of sequel that takes all the good work from the original, and reverses it, making for a clichéd, bland and boring follow-up, with the only thing it achieves is proving the proverb two is better than one, isn’t always the case.