When writer-director Dean Devlin titled his handsomely budgeted new action tentpole Geostorm, he entered into an unspoken pact with his prospective audience. He chose a goofy, make-believe word, and in doing so, promised a goofy, make-believe movie. Nobody’s walking into the auditorium looking for lofty insights on the complexities of the human condition, or even a commentary on how the timebomb that is climate change continues ticking away due to political gridlock. It ain’t Citizen Kane and it ain’t An Inconvenient Truth, and there’s no sport in expecting it to be. All parties involved should understand the terms of this tacit agreement, an “if you build it, they will come” proposition in which “it” refers to nothing short of a natural apocalypse. All Devlin needed to do was deliver a storm, and no ordinary storm – a storm of geo-proportions. To put it in the parlance of our times, you had one job.

Imagine, then, a re-edit of Jaws in which Richard Dreyfuss and company get word from authorities at sea that a shark is on the way to savage their precious shores. They then spend most of the film doing everything in their power to prevent the shark’s arrival, and though Spielberg occasionally cuts to reveal a sliver of fin, they successfully ward off the leviathan before the beach turns bloodbath. Devlin lets out minute-long dribs and drabs of Mother Gaia’s terrible might, torching Hong Kong here and drowning Abu Dhabi there, but viewers take heed: there is no full-blown geostorm in Geostorm. We have been sold a false bill of goods.

If Devlin had his act together where the storm is concerned, viewers might be willing to overlook such trivial matters as pat characterization, a ludicrous plot and stale dialogue. But he doesn’t earn a tenth of the goodwill it’d take to get away with a creation as absurd as Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler). A hard-living single dad with a taste for booze and a distaste for the pencil-necked bureaucrats’ rules, he’s the usual “cop on the edge” type, except that he’s an astronaut. Step aside, John Glenn, because Jake’s the dudeliest dude Nasa has ever seen; not only does he have perfect five o’clock shadow at all times, he invented a global network of satellites codenamed “Dutch Boy” that artificially controls the planet’s atmosphere and halted global warming in its tracks. This, believe it or not, goes awry.

That could be the movie. Weather computer goes haywire, Earth descends into a worldwide CGI tempest, our thick-necked hero goes to space to put the kibosh on the end of days, everyone goes home happy. But Devlin, whose pen last wrought armageddon with the brain-dead Independence Day: Resurgence, fritters away his run time on a medley of nonsense that the viewer can’t help but resent for not being the destruction of Malaysia by heat-laser. (That’s the one advantage this mess has on more accomplished brethren such as The Day After Tomorrow, by the way. That film had Jake Gyllenhaal, and this one has a heat-laser.)

There’s plenty of business with Jake’s younger brother Max (Jim Sturgess), the estranged relationship between them, and his confidential romance with a Secret Service body-woman. In the most pragmatic sense, Max’s function is to connect the main action with a subplot involving a vast governmental conspiracy either spearheaded by President Tough Guy (Andy Garcia) or Secretary of State Old Tough Guy (Ed Harris). He is a bare vestibule connecting two empty rooms.

As a yawning chasm of boringness, he’s also the most problematic element in a script that’s torturously close to busting through the floor and hitting “so bad it’s good” territory. If Devlin’s not capable of mounting the bad-weather epic America’s panting for, he could have at least given us the dim-bulb B-flick hinted at by such hokey details as a giant “COUNTDOWN TO GEOSTORM” clock. (It wouldn’t have been difficult, either; every utterance of the word “geostorm” got at least a small laugh from this critic’s screening.) But he wastes so many scenes marking time, unspooling a plot nobody could possibly be called on to care about while an instant blizzard is spreading across Afghanistan like an icy bubonic plague.

The storm should be the star, not a fleeting sideshow from Gerard Butler’s most determined efforts to emote. The movie’s called Geostorm, after all, not Cool Guy’s Space Redemption. In this genre, a surfeit of anything that isn’t the large-scale annihilation of Rio de Janeiro is simply taking up valuable reel space.