Producers: Scott Adkins, Craig Baumgarten, Ben Jacques, Joe Karimi-Nik and Erik Kritzer   Director: The Kirby Brothers   Screenplay: Stu Small   Cast: Scott Adkins, Ray Stevenson, Perry Benson, Sarah Chang, George Fouracres, Faisal Mohammed, Peter Lee Thomas, Beau Fowler, Andy Lang, Flaminia Cinque and Adam Basil   Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: C+

Anybody looking for ninety minutes of mindless martial arts mayhem with a crudely comic edge could do worse than this sequel to 2018’s “Accident Man,” which returns Scott Adkins to the fray as Mike Fallon, the paid assassin who gets his nickname by preferring to disguise his killings as mere mishaps.  Based loosely on a comic book series from the 1990s, the movie occasionally employs garishly cartoonish inserts to confess that origin, but generally Stu Small’s script and the direction by the Kirby Brothers (George and Harry), relative newcomers who also edited, stick to B-movie action formula.

They’re fortunate to have cult favorite Adkins to anchor the picture, which sends Fallon into exile after he’d pretty much decimated the English hit-man gang of Big Ray (Ray Stevenson) in the search for the killer of his ex-girlfriend in the previous movie.  Thinking it better to make himself scarce to avoid reprisals, Mike heads to Malta, where the movie was shot (and which is made to look a lot grubbier and less photogenic by cinematographer Richard Bell than it might have been).

There Fallon finds lots of work; the place is apparently a haven for nefarious types that wealthy clients are willing to pay handsomely to have knocked off.  He’s doing nicely, and hones his fighting skills by hiring the incredibly skilled, nasty-mouthed Siu-Ling (Sarah Chang), whom he meets in a bar, to launch surprise attacks on him to keep him at his martial-arts best.  (It’s a gag lifted, of course, from the Pink Panther movies with Clouseau and his houseboy Cato.)

But soon one of his old colleagues from England shows up: Finicky Fred (Perry Benson), a chubby goofball who specializes in inventing unusual devices to kill potential targets.  He’s come to Malta to track down a girl named Leylo he connected with online, but soon becomes Fallon’s partner in crime. Their business flourishes.

Things go awry when they’re abducted by imperious crime lord Mrs. Zuuzer (Flaminia Cinque), who demands that they take her up on an offer to track down whoever is trying to kill her loathsomely sniveling, self-absorbed son Dante (George Fouracres), a would-be stage star.  Under duress they agree, only to learn that hers was a general offer to all hit-men, and they find themselves in competition with the best—and most theatrical—in the trade. 

The first half-hour of “Hitman’s Holiday” is actually pretty good—obvious but crassly funny, with violence that has a ghoulishly comic edge, and fine rapport between Adkins and Chang on the one hand and Adkins and Benson on the other.  The introduction of snarling, motor-mouthed Cinque adds to the energy.

But then matters get more problematic.  A lot of space is devoted to Fouracres’ Dante, a tiresome character who, at one point, stupidly swallows a GPS tracker that has to be extracted with lots of laxative, leading to a surfeit of crummy scatological humor.  And the rest is a parade of prolonged martial-arts fights with the rest of the champion hit-men, guys with nicknames like The Angel of Death, The Vampire, Silas the San Francisco Strangler, Poco the Killer Clown and Oyumi the Ninja.  Big Ray shows up as one of the contenders, too, though in the end he proves more colleague than competitor.  (Oddly, there’s little on-road action here.  Fallon whizzes down streets—curiously, almost invariably empty—on his motorcycle from time to time, but there are no vehicle chases or crashes. Too expensive?)

The matches are certainly well choreographed, shot and edited, but they’re just too long, though the guys who play the opponents—Faisal Mohammed (Vampire), Peter Lee Thomas (Silas), Beau Fowler (Poco), and Andy Lang (Oyumi) all hold their own.  At one point Siu-Ling joins the fray, so that the Kirbys can cut from one fight to another in an attempt to avoid tedium.  But they don’t succeed.  Fallon’s one-on-one with Poco, who’s impervious to pain, and apparently to death (until he isn’t), is exhaustingly overlong, and Fowler’s cackling grows duller and duller as it goes on. 

The picture does regain its footing for a satisfying finale, which happily hearkens back to one of Freddy’s sillier ideas, but the damage has been done. Of course the fights are what most viewers will come for, and for them, the longer the better.  Certainly Adkins delivers, while Stevenson brings his burly menace to the last act (his monologue about an English breakfast is nicely written and played); and John Koutrelinis keeps things pumped up with a bombastic score.  If you’re a fan of the genre, or just of the star, who can roll out snarky remarks with the best of them, this will certainly satisfy.  It’s certainly preferable to the lumbering Hollywood blockbuster-sized versions of this sort of stuff.  But it’s still a bit too pleased with itself.