High risk, high reward: if you’re looking to make a sprawling espionage movie with an ensemble cast, there’s a lot of moving pieces on the table. If handled correctly, a good script and confident direction can help the audience punch through twisty plot details, tradecraft, and geopolitics, and feel a lot smarter at the end. But sometimes the finer details elude the filmmakers’ grasp, leading to an experience closer to the military abbreviation FUBAR.

The latter is true of French director Olivier Assayas’ new film Wasp Network, which Netflix acquired this past January, and released this month. Despite a starry cast and a ripped-from-the-headlines story - which is only now receiving its first big-budget adaptation - the movie never coheres into anything beyond a string of loose sequences. Some of these beats work on their own, but Wasp Network never escapes the feeling that it’s missing huge chunks of material, or choking its main performances.

I’m a relative latecomer to Olivier Assayas’ movies, but based on the last three features he’s made, I became a quick fan. Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper are both essential parts of Kristen Stewart’s maturing filmography, and Assayas’ 2018 dramedy Doubles vies was one of my favourites from that year’s Toronto International Film Festival. So the news that Assayas would jump into a favourite genre of mine with actors like Penélope Cruz, Edgar Ramírez, Gael García Bernal, and Ana de Armas sounded like an instant win. Now all I want to do is catch up on Assayas’ older work instead, and forget Wasp Network exists.

Based on a book by Brazilian journalist Fernando Morais, we find ourselves in Cuba in 1990. The Soviet Union, Cuba’s biggest ally and the source for many of its resources, has fallen and the future of the Castro regime is in doubt. A community of refugees have built a powerful base of support in Miami, using small commercial aircraft to scatter propaganda leaflets in Havana and to guide rafts laden with refugees across the sea to the U.S. The exile group, however, isn’t just interested in peaceful efforts; they have tacitly used drug smuggling to fund a campaign of non-lethal terrorist attacks on Cuban hotels. The Cuban government is forced to send infiltrators into the exile community to disrupt these plans, by any means necessary.

We’re introduced to René (Ramírez), a distinguished Cuban pilot who served in the Cuban military intervention in Angola. As the story begins, René mysteriously takes a plane from the skydiving operation where he works, flies to Florida, and defects to the United States. Around the same time, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura), a Cuban Air Force major, also defects. Both men are warmly welcomed by the exile community, and soon begin flying missions for them.

René has left his wife Olga (Cruz) and young daughter in Havana, and initially they struggle with the news that he’s been branded a traitor in Cuba. Meanwhile, Juan Pablo strikes up a relationship with Ana Magarita Martinez (de Armas), a Cuban-American socialite, and not long afterwards, they marry in a luxurious ceremony.

In swift order, there are offers of jobs as FBI informants for the two men, offers of more work transporting drugs from Latin America, and revelations of René and Juan Pablo’s true purpose in Miami. If it sounds like Assayas has crammed a lot into this movie, you’d be right. After about 45 minutes, I lost all track of how much time was supposed to be passing between scenes. Characters leave the movie altogether with little notice, as if they were not all that important to begin with.

Assayas may not work much in TV, but perhaps the best approach for Wasp Network would have been the model of the filmmaker’s three-part, 5.5 hour epic about Carlos the Jackal from 2010 (which also starred Ramírez). As it is, the 128 minutes here drown in expository dialogue and feature few sustained set pieces; for an espionage story, we get precious little tradecraft and the tension regularly evaporates between sequences. There aren’t even any obvious villains onscreen, other than the nebulous and generations-long cold war between the U.S. and Cuba. Since the main characters change allegiances more than once, it’s unclear what sort of outcome we should be rooting for.

Wasp Network is never embarrassing, but it easily fits into the collection of middling recent Netflix acquisitions. It doesn’t even boast a performance or scene worth recommending - you might be better served to simply read up on the real-life Cuban Five incident. As adept as Olivier Assayas has been at cracking open the motivations and inner demons of his characters in his recent work, the Cuba of Wasp Network might as well have remained classified.

Wasp Network gets two stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Not enough contrast or conflict is drawn between René/Olga and Juan Pablo/Ana.

• Life in the exile community and life in 1990s Cuba is only ever talked about, not seen - another missing bit of contrast.

• Even though only a few of the movies have been hits, you can’t deny that Ana de Armas is becoming one of the hardest-working, most visible actors in the business.