Hang around long enough as a cinephile and you’ll eventually watch significant filmmakers fade into irrelevance. If you’ve only gotten the bug sometime in the past 15 years, you may be largely unfamiliar with Neil LaBute, who’d once briefly appeared to be a major new filmmaker; after grabbing attention with 1997’s In the Company of Men—a truly scathing simultaneous indictment and celebration of toxic masculinity that, among other things, introduced Aaron Eckhart to the world—he was courted by Cannes (where Nurse Betty played in the 2000 Competition), adapted A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (with Gywneth Paltrow in the lead), and even somehow managed to make Paul Rudd look vaguely unattractive (in 2003’s The Shape of Things). Some of these films were significantly stronger than others, but every one of them was at the very least interesting, and that continued to be the case even after LaBute more or less torched his career by remaking cult horror classic The Wicker Man as a bizarrely campy comedy. Nowadays, he’s best known as the man who gave us Nicolas Cage bellowing “No! Not the bees!”; even at his worst, though, LaBute has always pushed the envelope, made an effort to create something out of the ordinary.

I guess that’s why Out of the Blue, his latest feature, made me actively angry. (Hell, even the title is lazy, having previously been used multiple times over many decades. Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, from 1980, seems as if it should have been sufficiently notable to ward off all future copycats.) Set in a picturesque beach town played by Newport, RI, the film begins with a chance meeting between Connor (Ray Nicholson) and Marilyn (Diane Kruger), who immediately strike up a heavy flirtation despite their significant age difference—Connor’s maybe 30, Marilyn probably closer to 50 than 40—and Marilyn’s wedding ring. Kruger gives Marilyn an unmistakable femme fatale vibe, and when we learn that Connor recently moved to the area after spending time in prison, it starts to look as if this might be yet another riff on classic noir, subdivision: Get rid of the inconvenient husband. That’s when Marilyn shows up at the local library, where Connor works, and requests his help selecting a novel involving murder. “Preferably one where the husband dies,” she adds, prompting Connor to pull copies of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice from the shelves. You know, just in case there might be a few viewers out there who are still fuzzy on the template for the movie they’re currently watching. Did I mention that we’re only nine minutes into said movie?

At this point, a reasonable person would think, “Well, LaBute’s being very upfront about his ostensible influences, which are among the most frequently imitated in cinema history, so he’ll surely subvert them in some noteworthy way.” Here’s the galling part: No, he won’t. He will just go right ahead and make the lamest, most extravagantly pointless Indemnity/Postman knockoff you can possibly imagine. Not only is everything that happens preordained, but the two main characters, both of whom have read those novels, themselves know exactly what movie they’re in and keep making knowing references to the way that their own reckless murder plot echoes Cain’s. Now, I can imagine a film that mocks its protagonists for committing a crime based on fictional accounts of similar crimes—in fact, I don’t even need to imagine it, because I saw American Animals, which does precisely that (while simultaneously interrogating the increasingly blurry line between drama and documentary). But LaBute’s not having any fun with this scenario, unless that fun consists of mocking us for voluntarily sitting through his movie, quixotically awaiting some surprise, even after he told us as bluntly as he possibly could right up front that it would be a straightforward recycling job.

Thing is, it’s also a lousy recycling job. Kruger has to contend with the ghosts of Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner, and at least succeeds in not embarrassing herself; it’s easy to believe that Connor would have trouble resisting Marilyn’s practiced seduction, even if she comes across as so transparently devious that his trust in her, when she keeps hinting that she’d sure love it if her allegedly abusive hubby were no longer around, is hard to swallow. Nicholson, however, despite potential genetic advantages—you may possibly have heard of his dad, retired actor Jack Nicholson—lacks the charismatic dynamism necessary to make Connor more than a generic doofus being led around by his libido. He’s got Dad’s physiognomy, but not the voice or the corresponding razor’s-edge attitude; it’s as if John Garfield had been replaced by Andrew Garfield, specifically as Peter Parker. LaBute’s faintly original contributions to the standard narrative include Connor’s ludicrously pugnacious parole officer (played, for some reason, by Hank Azaria, straining to be badass) and Kim, a young woman with a crush on Connor, who’s seemingly the library’s only other employee and is made up and costumed, when we first see her, precisely like Diane Keaton as Annie Hall, for no reason that I can fathom. It’s definitely not a coincidence—Kim even says “la di da” at one point. Is this meant to be another layer of meta-commentary about LaBute serving up leftovers? Just a random bit of self-amusement on his part? Beats the hell outta me.

What’s most frustrating about this fiasco is that it does, for about the space of one minute, look as if LaBute might indeed have come up with a moderately clever variation on the Cain model. After considerably more throat-clearing than noir usually bothers with—it somehow takes a small eternity for Connor to propose killing Marilyn’s husband, even though she practically handed him a job application to that effect in the first 10 minutes—we finally get the murder attempt, which takes place at the victim’s home in the middle of the night. (Marilyn has established an alibi for herself by leaving town.) First, Connor breaks in, clad in a mask, to find nobody there. Then…well, it’d be churlish to give away the film’s sole twist (not counting a reveal at the end that’s dumb enough to inspire groans). Suffice it to say that I would have loved for this to be, and briefly thought that it might be, the story of a noir chump who discovers that the irresistible woman for whom he’s risking the electric chair has in fact engineered multiple chumps, as a redundancy measure, like an airplane carrying more engines than it needs in case one fails. Alas, no. Instead, we get Connor receiving a visible wound on his neck (of which he’s very much aware), being asked by his clearly suspicious probation officer how he received it, at a scheduled meeting, and somehow not having prepared a story in advance. That’s just plain insulting—but, then, the film as a whole feels like an insult. Maybe it’s a forgotten director’s petty act of revenge.