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Ricky Gervais fans, heed this warning: His signature observational embarrassment humor is nowhere to be found in The Invention of Lying, which instead plays like a stretched-thin series of gags strung together.

With The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais (creator and star of the original The Office and Extras) seems to be making a bid to be a soft-hearted Woody Allen. The opening titles cards are a familiar white-on-black text, and almost immediately Gervais begins his narration with a bit of snarky meta-commentary on the credits themselves. Gervais gives us the premise: he lives in a world where lying was never invented, and everyone is brutally honest with everyone else all the time. It’s just the sort of modern fantasy premise that would feel snugly at home in an Allen movie.

But the snark doesn’t last, or at least not the hard stuff. We meet Mark Bellison (Gervais) as he prepares for a blind date with beautiful, successful Anna (Jennifer Garner), who immediately registers her disappointment with Mark’s physical appearance. (In this world, “telling the truth” means holding nothing back.) It’s a funny kind of skit—Mark and Anna mostly skipping past nervousness and trepidation right into airing their many misgivings and uncertainties—that carries right into dinner and a humiliating (for Mark) phone call between Anna and her mother.

The movie carries on like this, giving us glimpses at what a world without lying would be like—shop signs that merely declare the goods, advertising that reiterates how famous the product is, and so on—right up to Mark’s job, as a screenwriter at “Lecture Pictures.” In a world without lying, respectable men reading lectures about history is what passes for cinema. Mark, unlucky at work as he is everywhere else in life, is in charge of the 13th century. And who wants to see lectures about the Black Plague, besides maybe teenage goths?

This carries on for a time, until Mark, at the brink of eviction, figures out how to lie. His fortunes change dramatically, and after a successful screenplay and the accidental founding of religion, Mark finds himself much wealthier but no more appealing to Anna, who’s succumbing to the attentions of Mark’s coworker and rival Brad (Rob Lowe). What’s a liar in a world full of rubes to do?

I circle again to the words “a funny kind of skit,” because that’s what much of The Invention of Lying feels like: A central premise and several ideas extrapolated from it and then mashed together to make a feature film. You know how a lot of Saturday Night Live skits introduce a joke within the first thirty seconds of a skit, and then hammer that joke into the ground for the next five minutes? Stretch that out to feature length. The endless procession of cameos only compounds the gimmicky, stretched-thin feel.

It doesn’t help that Gervais’s signature vicious humor—the reason anyone knows who he is—is almost completely absent. (An odd problem, considering he wrote the thing.) There are little barbs here and there, and plenty of humor at Mark’s expense, but the general softness and sweetness of the enterprise muddles the tone into an odd, unlikable mess. We’re really meant to believe that Anna is the woman for Mark, but aside from being very pretty, she is incredibly vain, arrogant, elitist, and unbelievably preoccupied with finding a “suitable genetic mate.” In a Gervais TV show, Anna’s vanity might be the joke. Here, I fear, Gervais has no idea how unlikable he’s made his female lead.

It’s that queer tone-deafness in characterization that mars The Invention of Lying, even more than the kid-gloves humor. Gervais seems to be groping for a statement in the detour-into-prophet segment of the proceedings, but the apparent lesson there—that religion is a safety blanket for many people—is both too broad and not terribly relevant to the premise of the film. It’s like a 45-minute detour into a parallel movie, and it is fatal to The Invention of Lying’s momentum. After this and Ghost Town (enjoyable but also thin and flavorless), I think I’ve learned my lesson: stick to small-screen Gervais.

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