Matthew Vaughn has had a storied career of colorful, pop-infused genre pictures with just the right amount of loving irreverence to keep them interesting. He’s played in a lot of sandboxes, but the last decade of his directorial efforts have been devoted to spy fiction, sending up all eras of James Bond in Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle before veering wildly off-reservation with the The King’s Man, a film so devoted to its alternate-history postulating that I’m still wrapping my head around anyone financing it.

Opening Friday in theaters before heading to Apple TV+ at a point to be determined, Argylle returns Vaughn to the comforts of the classic spy tale, playing up Bondian riffs and some other, more spoilerish influences. (No, this article won’t spoil the identity of “the real Agent Argylle,” on which the entire marketing campaign has been centered.) It’s a PG-13, made-for-streaming movie that feels like it pulls a lot of punches to reach the widest audience possible. Vaughn’s best films were the ones that balanced his excesses with real heart. This one has heart but not the excess and winds up a forgettable whiff.

Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the world-famous author of a series of popular action novels about the titular agent Argylle (Henry Cavill, seen through onscreen depictions of her novels’ events). Argylle is the stereotypical secret agent — nice suit, chiseled good looks, charisma to spare. Elly is on the verge of completing the fifth book in her series when she hits a snag: For once in her career, she can’t figure out what comes next for the character. She hops on a train to visit her mother, Ruth (Catherine O’Hara), but she’s quickly caught up in a real-life espionage game when Aidan (Sam Rockwell), a goofy middle-aged spy, informs Elly that her books have been predicting real-life events. Her stories are so accurate, in fact, that the Division, a secret organization gone evil, will stop at nothing to make her finish her final chapter.

For the most part, Argylle is a competent action-adventure. The twists are all fairly obvious from the get-go; the outlandish answers online to the “who is the real Agent Argylle” meme is going to leave people disappointed when they see the solution. But that’s sort of part-and-parcel with the kind of movie this is. Unlike Vaughn’s other films, Argylle doesn’t try to break the mold or make metafictional commentary. The closest it gets to bringing something new to the game is pairing Howard and Rockwell, neither of whom has traditionally fit the physicality or personality of the super-spy motif. They both bring a lot of game to their parts and are consistently enjoyable throughout. Samuel L. Jackson also shows up in a supporting role as good-guy spook Alfred Solomon. He’s just there to sit in a chair and have a good time.

Unfortunately, the script by Jason Fuchs is often long where it needs to be lean for this sort of story. Characters frequently exposit on twists that are clear in and of themselves; sequences are talked through before they happen. Apple financed the film, and it feels like a movie financed by a streaming company that ultimately doesn’t need to worry about anything but content people can watch while scrolling through their phones. There’s so much repeated information that even the least attentive audience member can follow along. When the story isn’t all that complicated, it’s just a lot of redundancy.

Vaughn tries to keep things moving with action sequences, and they’re typically well-choreographed but lacking in the same stylistic flair as his past films (with a lone, late-in-the-game exception). They, too, start to feel rote as the story drags on, and like many streaming-focused projects, Argylle feels like a film with four endings.

I wanted to like Argylle more than I did, although it’s not bad by any stretch — just another movie that will, after its theatrical run, evaporate into the ether of AppleTV+.