There’s nothing overtly wrong with the idea of making a sequel to a much-loved children’s classic. But you rather hope for a slightly more daring approach than just reassembling all the same plot points and stringing them together with a bunch of new characters. After a while, it stops feeling like screenwriting and starts looking like a kind of dramatic trigonometry.
This sequel to the 1970 original takes place at the end of the second world war, with Jenny Agutter reprising her role as Bobby, now a grandmother, and a trio of evacuees from Salford filling the vacant slots of newcomers to the sleepy village. It’s all perfectly inoffensive kids’ entertainment, but aside from the well-meaning but slightly jarring BLM messaging, it’s ploddingly predictable stuff.