This one’s a heartbreaker. Chris Pine, arguably the best of the Hollywood Chrises, (have any of the others made a movie as good as Hell Or High Water?) making his directorial debut with a Big Lebowski-esque comedy noir? On paper, this should’ve been a knockout, but shockingly little about Poolman comes together in a satisfying way. It’s only 100 minutes long, but you’ll probably still be checking your watch long before the halfway point.

The story involves Darren Barrenman (Pine), who works as a pool cleaner, caught up in a conspiracy that sees… somebody… doing something-or-other vaguely nefarious involving L.A.’s water supply.

Sadly, that’s about the extent that this writer can a mere few days after watching the movie. The plot here is opaque, meandering and bizarrely free of stakes; because we spend pretty much the whole film with no clear idea what’s going on or what’s at risk, it’s awfully hard to get invested in it.

It has the feeling of a shaggy-dog story, which can work well for the kind of comedy noir that this is trying to be. The mystery plot isn’t very compelling and doesn’t amount to much, but that’s not the end of the world. If it ultimately turned out that nothing meant anything, the joke was on us for trying to make sense of it, and the punchline was funny enough to sell that, then it could have worked. That’s pretty much what Burn After Reading does, after all.

The trouble there is that Burn After Reading is really, really funny, and The Big Lebowski is also really, really funny. Poolman, for all that it does try, just isn’t. It has the requisite group of incompetent, eclectic weirdos trying very ineptly to crack the case, but they muster up very few laughs. Pine is certainly game and has some entertaining moments channelling his inner Jeff Bridges, and Danny DeVito manages the occasional chuckle as Darren’s strange, rambling sort-of father figure.

He’s the Walter to Pine’s Dude, and the two of them give a strong sense that they could have made a truly entertaining double act if they had a better script to work with. It does ultimately feel like a waste of a lot of truly talented actors, however. Annette Bening is in this! So is Clancy Brown! But they just don’t have anything substantial to work with, never mind the kind of memorable, quotable dialogue you’re after from a film like this.

The screenplay is the big problem, because you can see the potential in the performers and Pine the director actually has a strong eye for an arresting image. There are some nice shots here, like his own anguished face framed between two people unexpectedly professing their love for one another, and a quite striking one of him and DeWanda Wise silhouetted in profile. Hopefully he goes on to direct again, because for all Poolman’s many frustrations, there is promise here.

But at the end of the day, it’s just dull and more than a little baffling. It doesn’t grip the way a serious noir needs to, and it doesn’t make you laugh the way a comedy noir needs to. You’re left with the final impression of a great deal of talent sadly squandered. It’s not a total catastrophe, but it isn’t good either; you’d be better off just watching Lebowski again.