“Have you ever fired your gun up in the air and gone, ‘Aaaaaaaargh!?”’ Nick Frost asks Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz, referencing an iconic Keanu Reeves moment from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 crime-and-surfing classic Point Break. Inevitably, Pegg gets to do just that, replaying the scene to oddly touching comic effect. Now, Luke Bracey gets to do it too, in this adrenaline-fuelled but empty rehash that flies close enough to Bigelow’s movie to remind you how much you’d much rather be watching the original.

As before, the story centres on a young FBI agent infiltrating a group of extreme sports enthusiasts and finding himself torn between his strait-laced mission and their free-form madness, here given an anti-capitalist eco-waffle twist. “So it’s not about money, it’s about spiritual enlightenment?” says Delroy Lindo’s Instructor Hall, taking a break from the usual declarations about his ass being on the line with this one blah blah blah.

As for Ray Winstone, he appears to have wandered in from another movie entirely, playing European field agent Pappas with the fluidly accented conviction of a contract player eager to be done with this nonsense. There are some vertiginous action sequences (snowboarding down mountains, base jumping through canyons, apparently done “for real”) but such thrills can’t sustain a whole movie.

While Bigelow tipped her hat toward the greater themes of Big Wednesday, director/cinematographer Ericson Core seems to take his cues from the empty flash of the Fast & Furious series, the first of which he shot. The result, disappointingly, is all froth and no depth.