Christopher Nolan’s fascination with time as a storytelling variable is well-documented throughout his filmography. In his breakout indie hit Memento, the story of John G and his murdered wife ran backwards with consecutive scenes taking place before what we have just watched; with Inception, dreams within dreams meant that different levels of the film’s universe occurred at different speeds creating a kind of temporal layer cake; and most recently, Dunkirk saw a major military event unfold over land, sea, and air in a matter of a week, a day and an hour, respectively, the various timelines intersecting and blending into one another. And the less said about Interstellar, wherein Nolan got all mushy over time and love, the better. This obsession with time as a resource and narrative centerpiece has finally gotten the best of Nolan in Tenet, an overblown blockbuster absolutely suffocated by tricks, bloated by exposition and wholly lacking in a human touch.

To attempt to describe the story structure of Tenet would be both a disservice to those not wanting spoilers and an exercise at tilting at windmills as the plot is so intentionally convoluted and sloppily complex that, quite frankly, I’m not even certain I could describe it if asked. Well that’s not entirely true. The narrative is relatively straight-forward, despite it moving forwards and backwards in time and having various networks of timelines occurring simultaneously. The issue perhaps is that Nolan’s screenplay insists on outsmarting its audience at the expense of allowing them to have fun with the intriguing concepts he presents.

Nolan as a screenwriter has a way of taking something relatively simple (Victorian-era magician rivalries, intergalactic space travel, dream heists) and overcomplicating it with screenwriting sleight of hand for the appearance of complexity. He stuffs his mystery boxes with double crosses, fake-outs, and complicated timelines, all often explained by blink-and-you-miss-it exposition minutia. In the best of situations, it leads to decades-long debates about what a spinning top means (although I would argue that the end of Inception is cut and dry for those paying attention) and, in the worst case, results in a head-scratching ode of the transcendent power of love, or something like that.

The overdone complications, playful timelines and filmmaking tricks are icing on the cake; moviemaking confection; a fanciful way of further dressing up clever concepts into something consumable for the masses. Tenet is all icing, no cake. Throughout his filmography, Nolan’s stories work in spite of his shortcomings (most notably a lack of humor and humanity; a reliance on technique over tenderness) but this time around, his worst instincts are on proud display and the result is a towering parfait of gobbledegook.

Tenet is Nolan’s worst film yet by virtue of it being just no fun at all. The visual wizardly of characters simultaneously moving backwards and forwards through time is novel and impressively realized but all the whizzbang spectacle in the world can’t make up for the hugely underwhelming character world and relationship building. In that regard, one may find themselves both fascinated by the technical accomplishments of Tenet but at an arm’s length from just about everything else. This disconnect is anchored in protagonist John David Washington’s drowsy, detached performance as a time-traveling spy-cum-savior.

Washington is bland to the point of dreadful, his detached line-readings of Nolan’s surgical understanding of how people talk and connect makes the film feel even more sterile and disconnected. With a vast majority of the film’s dialogue centered on exposition, there’s almost nothing to take away from Washington’s character and we’re left with one of the most nothing lead characters in a Nolan joint to date.

The rest of the supporting cast does not necessarily fare better with Elizabeth Debicki offering a similarly muted and emotionally-sedate performance, Aaron Taylor-Johnson failing to mine any deeper characterization than as written on the page, and Himesh Patel and Dimple Kapadia failing to move the dial much at all. Kenneth Branagh runs the other direction with the material, disproportionately sinking his incisors into the dripping red meat of the film’s overcooked baddie Andrei Sator. Only Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of breezy English safecracker Neil communicates any sense of fun but even he is wildly underutilized.

At two and a half hours, Tenet is an overbearing bore that becomes a slog early on and doesn’t let up. I found myself not caring about these characters no matter how screwy the situation they found themselves in because the script pays them no mind. They are action figures in a sandbox. No more, no less. When things finally start heating up, I found myself so detached that it was hard to invest in the outcome because I just did not care. But despite its many flaws and shortcomings, Tenet is distinctly Nolan…but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Tenet ought to be considered a reckoning for a celebrated director veering dangerously close to hack; a warning sign that when artifice completely overwhelms art, you risk losing your audience. And we all know that Nolan is, first and foremost, a showman in need of an audience.

CONCLUSION: ‘Tenet’ sees director Christopher Nolan completely bend the knee to technical showmanship and entirely ignore the bread and butter of what makes films engaging: character. Though the mostly-practical VFX achievements make you wonder how he did this or that, there is no excuse for how actively not fun Tenet is.