If you get the idea you’ve seen Next Day Air before, it’s because you have. There is not one scene, not one line of dialogue, not one character arc or joke or conceit that does not have an ancestor in a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino film, and if you’ve seen enough of those you’re going to be spending your time picking them out. Even the “two guys opening a trunk” POV shot makes an appearance.

But where Ritchie and Tarantino told their stories through a bunch of gabby white people from L.A. and England, director Benny Boom and writer Blair Cobbs focus instead on a predominantly black cast in some of the sketchier parts of Philadelphia. See if the following sounds familiar.

Inept delivery guy Leo (Donald Faison) drops a box off at the apartment of Brody (Mike Epps) and Guch (Wood Harris), two low-level hoods with more ambition than brains. The package contains ten bricks of cocaine, and was meant for Jesus (Cisco Reyes) and his girlfriend Chita (Yasmin Deliz) next door.

Jesus not receiving the package is a big problem: Scary Mexican mobster Bodega (Emilio Rivera), the man who sent the package, does not like it when hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise just up and disappears. Meanwhile, Brody and Guch get the idea to sell their cocaine windfall to Brody’s cousin Shavoo (Omari Hardwick), a high-level gangster and drug dealer.

If you’ve ever seen True Romance or Snatch or Reservoir Dogs, you know how this is going to go down, and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say Next Day Air ends with a big shootout between the major players. The only real surprise (dim as it may be) is in finding out who lives and who dies, and why.

So you know the beats. That’s not necessarily a death sentence; a good movie distinguishes itself in how it plays the notes. But here, too, Next Day Air falls short of its promise, squandering a solid cast and not-half-bad premise by resting on the laurels of its sources. It’s as if Boom and Cobbs are content to put their names on a well-worn story template and call it a day.

There are a few performances that stand out. Rivera is suitably menacing as Bodega, and Hardwick offers what little pathos Next Day Air can spare with his portrayal of the repentant Shavoo. Deliz gets a few laughs as Chita, which are usually sunk by Reyes’ wavering between sulky and angry. Fans of The Wire (such as myself) may never quite adjust to Harris, who played fearsome drug kingpin Avon Barksdale in that show, cracking wise and acting like a two-bit hood. In a gross miscalculation, Mos Def (who provides the one bit of legitimately hilarious physical comedy) has a screen time clocking in around 3 minutes.

Sometimes, in a comedy, you have to wait a little while before the Funny starts rolling. Skilled filmmakers will let a few semi-lame zingers go while they’re building the framework for larger laughs further down the line, and when the moment comes you can almost hear the click as all cylinders fire up and the yuks start coming.

I waited for that moment in Next Day Air in vain. You will know within the first ten minutes whether the movie will ever make you laugh, and except for a stray chuckle or smile it never gets anywhere meaningful. As a crime film, Next Day Air is uninspired. As a comedy, it is a flatline.