We've seen all this before, haven't we? The infrastructural guts of the modern city as a setting for explosions, gunfights and increasingly manic race-the-clock scenarios? How many heroes have climbed atop an elevator, as does the character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt? How many have plotted a route through a building's air ducts? These are architectural cliches, dredged up from Hollywood's collective memory.

It's also telling that when these dream-cities begin to collapse, they don't splinter, melt or drain away. They explode and disintegrate and tumble percussively in on themselves. It's a combination of loud Hollywood spectacle and the scenes we all watched of the World Trade Centre's destruction: Michael Bay meets 9/11 somewhere deep in Nolan's subconscious.

When Cobb and Ariadne make the tremulous decision to move down into a fourth dream world, I hoped we might finally be headed for a riot of architectural invention. Instead, we get an odd, desultory cross between downtown Los Angeles circa 1965 and the urban-planning fantasies of the French modernist architect Le Corbusier.

If an architecture student went before a thesis review panel, declared their goal was to invent "new places" and then unveiled that scene, they'd be called out for wallowing in a druggy kind of mid-century nostalgia and sent back to the drawing board. Sorry, to the computer.

So how to explain this? Why is a movie that puts mind-bending architecture so squarely at the centre of its story so architecturally underwhelming? Why does its attempt to make metaphorical links between buildings and storyline fall so far below the standard set by classics from the 1970s – the documentary Grey Gardens, say, or the paranoid thriller The Parallax View – or, more recently, by Up in the Air, (500) Days of Summer and the television shows Mad Men and Rubicon?