Argylle—note the second “L,” please—should be investigated for creative embezzlement. There’s just no way a film this stacked with idiosyncratic talent (Sam Rockwell! Catherine O’Hara! Bryan Cranston! Richard E. Grant) can be so relentlessly, thuddingly, punishingly devoid of even the most fleeting molecule of amusement unless it’s all a put-on. I thought of the way the producers in, uh, The Producers created a musical called Springtime for Hitler in an (unsuccessful) attempt to lose eye-watering sums of money.

Winking hard enough to give itself an aneurysm, this tediously self-aware spy comedy comes to us “from the twisted mind of”—per the film’s marketing materials—Matthew Vaughn, a Brit with more than a few good movies under his belt. His directing debut, the 2004 crime flick Layer Cake, more or less got its star, Daniel Craig, the role that would take him from being famous in the U.K. to famous all over the world. Vaughn also made 2011’s X-Men: First Class, a swinging ’60s-set prequel that remains one of the two or three best entries in that wildly uneven superhero franchise. More recently, he’s translated the espionage-themed comic-book series Kingsman into three films, finding them to be the ideal platform for a shock-and-awe sensibility that still felt—at least somewhat—surprising when the first entry came out in 2014. 

But now, several lifetimes and 200 comic-book movies later, that sensibility is as played out as the 1970s slow jams Vaughn drops over his new film’s bloodless, consequence-free action sequences whenever he wants to signal to us that he’s doing all of this ironically—it’s not that he’s actually out of ideas, he’s just mocking how uninspired his comic-book flick/spy flick contemporaries are. Give me the earnestness of an impossible Mission any day—they’re not just exponentially more thrilling than Vaughn’s sardonic nihilism, they’re funnier, too.

The most interesting thing about Argylle is its marketing campaign. Vaughn and screenwriter Jason Fuchs are pretending that this is an adaptation of a preexisting and beloved spy novel series created and written by Actual, Genuine, Real Life Person, Elly Conway. The story they’re selling, in the movie’s press notes and on its promotional campaign, is that in the course of adapting Conway’s book, they hit upon the metafictional delight of making Conway herself a central character in the movie, like how Meryl Streep played Susan Orlean in Adaptation. It’s much more likely Elly Conway is the pen name of an author they commissioned to write a single Argylle tie-in novel, which was published last month, as part of the campaign for the movie. (The Conway of Argylle-the-movie is promoting the fourth book in her series, though in our world, you can only purchase and read one.)

The Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen did the gumshoe work of demonstrating that the existence of waitress turned bestselling novelist Elly Conway is almost certainly all Swiftian nonsense, although whether the Swift in question is Jonathan (b. 1667) or Taylor (b. 1989) remains unsettled.

Regardless of who—or if—Elly Conway actually is, her Argylle avatar is Bryce Dallas Howard, who is as blameless for the dreadful results here as she was in those three Jurassic World movies. (Those were bad, but not this bad.) Her fictional-or-is-he literary creation, Agent Argylle, is Henry Cavill, given an unflattering flattop and shorn of the considerable charm and comic timing he showed in Guy Ritchie’s underseen The Man From U.N.C.L.E., just to compare cheeky British spy flicks to cheeky British spy flicks. 

Cavill has been in good movies and bad ones, but Rockwell—playing the actual spy who informs Elly that her bestselling novels are close enough to reality to make an international terrorist cabal want to kill her—is usually a more astute judge of material than this. Vaughn loves the device of having Elly think she’s watching Cavill do some cool spy shit only to blink and realize it’s really Rockwell handling the action hero derring-do. It’s a C-grade gag the first time Vaughn does it, and it does not get funnier or cleverer with repetition. 

Remember when Samuel L. Jackson was one of the most exciting performers in cinema? He shows up for a few minutes, too, presumably lured by the promise of yet another spymaster part that doesn’t require him to act, leave his home, or stand up. If you happen to recall that he played the villain in the franchise-starting Kingsman: The Secret Service, you’ll also recall how much better he was in that than in this.

Vaughn’s habit of recycling gags and action sequences, not just from his so-so Kingsman films but within this one movie, pads this turkey to an unconscionable 139 minutes—only 10 minutes shorter than 2001: A Space Odyssey, for crying out loud. Vaughn could shave that by half an hour just by showing us all his digitally glazed slo-mo pursuits and fights sequences at regular speed. 

Life’s too short for movies like this. So are most domestic flights.

Argylle (PG-13, 139 min.) opens at area theaters Feb. 2.