Everyone’s favourite plasticine chicken is back! But enough about Brexit’s impact on UK food standards. Here’s the 2023 Netflix sequel to Chicken Run.

Having eggscaped the evil cluckches of Mrs. Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) and enjoying life as free-rangers, the chickens are whisked back into action when the young Molly (Bella Ramsey) winds up trapped in a high-tech nugget factory. And while it is logical and admirable for the chick flick to tackle factory farming, the sequel swaps the Britishness of Tweedy’s Farm for generic and flavourless action with robots, losing its head and heart in the process.

The film first ruffled feathers when Julia Sawalha (who voiced Ginger) revealed that she had been replaced (by Thandiwe Newton) because she was deemed too old to voice plasticine poultry, in which case they should have cast Ryan Gosling. More understandably, former chicken-cannonball act Rocky is now voiced by Zachary Levi, a name so Jewish it was bound to have annoyed his predecessor Mel Gibson.

There are other changes to the rooster roster but it is the absence of directors Peter Lord and Nick Park that is toughest to swallow, since the movie sorely misses the original’s sinister direction and clever homage to The Great Escape. Dawn of the Nugget trades the prisoner-of-war allegory for a half-baked Mission: Impossible parody that doesn’t fly for the simple reason that farmyard chickens are prisoners and not spies. Unless Netflix knows something we don’t.

Ironically the picture ends up resembling a fast-food repackaged Chicken Run, serving up an over-engineered version of the Aardman classic without any of the nourishment. The wacky sci-fi processing plant is so over-the-top that any animal welfare commentary gets lost in a paltry plot that fails to give the characters anything to do beyond cracking a couple of yolks, although Babs (Jane Horrocks) and the rats (Romesh Ranganathan and Daniel Mays) still land some zingers.

While not a total turkey, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget drains the viewer’s battery life and goes down as a rare misfire from the Aardman canon.