There’s an only-in-America charm to French Montana, the Casablanca-born Bronx rapper who—through persistence and the imprimatur of whichever label is behind him—has failed steadily upward into a world of fast cars, Kardashian trysts, and tigers on leashes. As New York’s Bloomberg-era mixtape circuit imploded, he curried favor with tastemakers from Atlanta and points south before emerging as a curator of blockbuster singles in the tradition of his indefatigable neighborhood elder Fat Joe. If his full-length collaborations with Fetty Wap, Max B, and Waka Flocka feel like ancient history, it’s because French is, improbably, the last man standing.

It’s possible that no one was exactly clamoring for a French Montana double album in 2019, even if, at 67 minutes, MONTANA’s two-disc packaging is simply a stylistic choice. Montana’s longtime producer Harry Fraud, an acolyte of melodramatic ’80s rock and contemporary foreign pop, helms Disc One. Whatever the joke is, Fraud’s always in on it, and his expansive productions comprise a self-referential universe reminiscent of a Tarantino flick. The title track’s smoky chords and weeping guitar build to one of his signature second-verse beat switches, but lacking a bright narrator like fellow Fraud clients Curren$y and Action Bronson, the unwaveringly lethargic tempo makes a slog of MONTANA’s front nine. “That Way,” a reimagining of Das EFX’s “Looseys,” neither reinterprets nor builds upon the 1992 original, and French stumbles over Cool & Dre’s stuttering beat on the listless “What It Look Like.”

Although Montana has a habit of sounding like a guest on his own tracks (you’ll be forgiven for failing to notice that he even clocks in between Kevin Gates and Kodak Black on “Lifestyle”), his better mixtapes feature moments in which opulence is less a taunt than an honest tribute to peers who never got to enjoy it. This can hardly be said of MONTANA, in which wealth’s depiction is surface-deep and kneecapped by French’s autopilot punchlines. The eponymous opener finds him “masturbatin’ on a scale for a hundred million, asking God how we made it”; he’s “militant like the Middle East” and “Big like the kid from Bed-Stuy.” There’s a lot of empty space in his bars.

Disc 2 is the big-tent attraction, picking up where 2017’s Jungle Rules, a trap-lite affair headlined by various Migos and Sremmurds, left off. It’s star-studded, dancefloor-ready, vaguely Caribbean. “Writing on the Wall,” a delectable serving of Hot 97 kibble, stands tall among Montana’s considerable singles catalog, with a Cardi B verse that ends with her “Rollin’ down the freeway, talkin’ ‘bout a three-way/Started workin’ out but he gon’ eat me on his cheat day.” The Swae Lee-featuring “Out of Your Mind” aims to recapture the magic of “Unforgettable” and gets most of the way there, whereas “Wiggle It” conscripts City Girls for a tried-and-true barnburner.

Despite the second disc’s upbeat highlights, it’s clear the well runs dry before the album’s over. “No Shopping” and “Lockjaw,” both singles from 2016’s MC4, reappear on MONTANA, as does the Drake duet “No Stylist” from mid-2018. “Hoop” sounds like a Quavo throwaway, and the Blueface and Lil Tjay feature “Slide” only perks up when the beat is briefly switched out for the “Serial Killa” instrumental halfway through.

French can be enigmatic, in that his strengths and shortcomings tend to blur together: He’s a citizen-of-the-world dabbler at best, at worst an uninspired cover artist. As a grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden, MONTANA is effectively too big to fail. But it’s perplexing that a project this market-tested came out so flimsy.