Ralph Breaks the Internet review – virtually impossible to enjoy tiresome arcade game re-run

The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph is an overstuffed but weirdly pointless exercise in tech worship that fails to include much that actually connects with the audience

Wreck-It Ralph, fictional star of a fictional 80s arcade game, is back for another exhaustingly pointless romp in the frenetic and jeopardy-free world of virtual reality. Only this time he's not wrecking, he's breaking, an entirely different concept. It is destruction for winners, not losers, like Kim Kardashian's bottom, or the Beatles breaking America, or that man in the Bois du Boulogne breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.

This headspinning, Ritalin-fuelled sequel to the 2012 film is somewhere between Ready Player One and The Emoji Movie, summoning up a zero-gravity spectacle of dazzling colours and vertiginous perspectives, a featureless and inert mashup of memes, brands, avatars and jokes. Some of these gags are pretty good: like the fairytale princesses who gather round the heroine to explain that a life-changing moment is always accompanied by "staring into some water". Some other gags aren't quite so fresh, like a gamer being called "Babe-raham Lincoln" - stolen from Wayne's World - and a nerd superfan asking pedantic questions at a convention - stolen from Galaxy Quest. And the incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.