It won no prizes for subtlety, but cheerful, victory-of-the-underdog comedy Bank of Dave featured a stonking lead performance by Rory Kinnear as Dave Fishwick. He’s the Burnley businessman who made millions selling vans then took a stand against fatcat bankers by opening his own community bank, the Bank of Dave, in 2011. Now Kinnear is back for a sequel, this time taking on crooked payday lenders. Like the first film, Bank of Dave 2 is predictable and cliché-ridden but gets by on likable, heartfelt performances, and the knowledge that in real life some of this stuff actually happened.

The film picks up two years after the original. The “Bank of Dave” on the high street in Burnley is still going strong – lending to ordinary people who struggle to secure loans from bigger banks. Dave is outraged to discover the sharp practices of payday lenders targeting the vulnerable (in one case squeezing £3,000 out of a £600 loan). Rob Delaney does his best in a small role as the film’s one-note villain Carlo Mancini, the New Jersey owner of fictional payday lender Quick Dough, who has links to organised crime.

Taking down money sharks; it’s a storyline that is impossible not to get behind. So really there is no need to lay on the man-of-the-people stuff so incredibly thickly; the script never misses an opportunity to remind us what a decent bloke Fishwick is. It would be grating were it not for Kinnear, and some nicely performed supporting roles. Chrissy Metz is terrific as a finance journalist from New York who Dave recruits to investigate Mancini. She gets the film’s best line, arriving in Burnley for the first time: “I’m from America. Sorry about that. But it’s better than being from London, right?”

• Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger is on Netflix from 10 January.