There’s a voiceover monologue about talkers versus doers that opens Troy Duffy’s Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, underneath some requisite gunplay, and it plays like a salty, metaphorical direct-address from its maker, a rebuke of all the swirling, extracurricular chatter and lawsuits that rose up and stalled for a decade if not completely swallowed his just-budding cinematic career. Duffy, you see, is a thick-necked, heart-on-his-sleeve doer — a blunt dispenser of commingled fact and opinion in life, and an equally forceful and straightforward peddler of reconstituted “cool” on the screen. Fitting, then, that the sequel to his 1999 shamrock shoot-’em-up The Boondock Saints is a bit more comedic, a bit more convoluted and a bit more everything than its predecessor, which is a heady thing for eager fans of the stillborn cult flick, and fairly irrelevant to just about everyone else.

Boondock Saints II continues the tough, stylized saga of the MacManus brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery, above right) and Murphy (Norman Reedus, above left). Since the events of the first movie, the two avenging angels have been in deep hiding with their father, Il Duce (Billy Connolly), in the quiet valleys of Ireland, far removed from the violence of their past lives. When word comes that a beloved priest has been gunned down by someone from deep within the mob, and in a manner seemingly constructed to frame them for the murder, the brothers return to Boston to mount a bloody and, naturally, theatrical crusade to bring justice to those responsible. In transit (by cargo ship, no less), the pair hook up with a new partner in crime, Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.), who’s heard tell of their legendary slayings, and wants to join forces with them.

Connor and Murphy give Romeo some razzing, but eventually relent in the face of his puppy dog insistence, and upon touching down in Boston the trio start trying to get to the bottom of the criminal syndicate of Concezio Yakavetta (Judd Nelson, playing a caricature of Judd Nelson), a paranoid mobster whose father was executed by the brothers MacManus in the first film. Meanwhile, three cops (Brian Mahoney, Bob Marley and David Ferry) who in the first movie conspired with Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) to aid the MacManus brothers in flight worry that a sexy new FBI operative, Special Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz), may unravel their complicity in events. Bickering and bloodshed ensues.

First off, some sincere and significant credit must be given to Duffy for making a big play, narratively speaking. Not content to merely lazily plop the brothers down in another ramshackle, discrete vigilante set-up, he constructs an elaborate, interwoven tale — complete with flashbacks to 1958 New York — that attempts to tie together a modern-day mystery plot and all sorts of glass-shield subterfuge with the elder MacManus’ own backstory and falling out with a shadowy ex-friend and colleague known as The Roman (Peter Fonda). Duffy swings for the fences, and that’s a heartening thing, because it shows how much he cares about both his story and his own second chance. If there’s an “A” to be awarded for effort, though, the movie’s reach exceeds its grasp, especially in late, third act strands that draw The Roman into the proceedings and speculate, conspiratorially, how diminutive Italian shooter Panza (Daniel DeSanto) could have been smuggled into the country in the wake of September 11 security measures. These bits are unsatisfying, and honest or interesting attempts to pay service to them are sacrificed in the name of balletic squib fixes, even with a running time of just under two hours.

The main problem, though, is that Duffy’s constructionist sensibilities and visual aesthetic are so typically rote — the notable exception being a vividly imagined sequence in which Eunice, in guns-blazing cowgirl get-up, talks her colleagues through her interpretation of the MacManus brothers’ siege on Concezio’s lair — as to induce snoozing. When Duffy isn’t busy trying to wildly tie together all the players of the Boondock universe, the rest of the movie plays out like any number of other generic, C-grade, straight-to-video actioners, and the hand cannon mayhem is cut together in a choppy, music video style that pays no particular respect to spatial constraints. For all the first film’s putative focus on religious right, and notions of properly meted out vengeance, Boondock Saints II is a movie that just seems inexorably stuck in late-’90s, post-Tarantino interpretations of indie cool, when guns held at cocked angles and saying some badass shit was catnip to young, hard-toiling guys with dreams of making their own movie. A lot of guys like Troy Duffy, actually. (Apparition/Stage 6, R, 117 minutes)