This adaptation of Lois Lowry’s multimillion-selling children’s future-fantasy novel might just have got away with its dopey dystopian shtick when Jeff Bridges first started developing the project 20 years ago. Today it just looks like a low-rent mishmash of Divergent and The Hunger Games, recycling riffs from Logan’s Run with sets and costumes lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Bridges plays the titular Giver, a croaky old sage in an age free from emotion who has become the repository of human memory – pictured here in the manner of a mobile phone advert. Brenton Thwaites is the boring youngling assigned to take on his mantle, with Katie Holmes as his robotic mum whose dinner-table scenes appear to be modelled on her former home life with the enthusiastic Scientologist Tom Cruise. Meanwhile Meryl Streep channels Bad Gandalf as the holographic Chief Elder, struggling to inject a note of gravitas into the increasingly exasperating nonsense.