Terry Gilliam is a visionary; he has a true talent for translating the madness that exists inside his head and transferring it into a beguiling cinematic experience. For many, this is just stating the obvious.

It's also fair to say that not only can being so creative be a strain, but possibly more challenging, the expectation of being so creative can take its toll too.

Unfortunately this, his latest work, feels unexpectedly and disappointingly tired.

Sitting at a desk all day crunching numbers can be pretty soul destroying. Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) is tired of working in his current environ and desperately wants to work from home. He's not exactly a people person. His boss Joby (David Thewlis) says that he'll try to have a word with Management (Matt Damon) and see if he can get him an audience with him.

Joby organises a party and invites Qohen; Qohen obviously turns him down. But when Joby dangles the carrot that Management has said that he will attend, Qohen begrudgingly agrees.

And he does indeed meet Management, who says its fine for him to work from home but only if he agrees to work on another project, to which Qohen willingly consents. As if that wasn't enough, a beautiful young woman is taken by him and writes her number on his arm. Although flattered, he has no real intention of getting in touch; he won't have time now that he's working on something new from home.

His new project is a curious one: he has been asked to work on the zero theorem. With his experience as an entity cruncher, Management wants him to mathematically calculate if life adds up to anything or if it actually means nothing at all.

To help him out, none other than Management's teenage son Bob (Lucas Hedges) is drafted in. His presence though is quite the distraction, as is Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) - the attractive woman he met at the party, who decided not to wait for Qohen to call and take the initiative herself.

With so much new disruption to his life in addition to the angst he already suffers from waiting for a call to inform him what the meaning of his life is, Qohen's quest for answers soon goes into overdrive.

Gilliam has said that this project constitutes the last entry in his dystopian satire trilogy that started with 1985's Brazil and continued with 1995's 12 Monkeys. Although it fits in thematically, it's not a satisfying finale.

The film is akin to something that looks like a Gilliam film but, on closer inspection is actually a fairly good cheap knock-off, but a knock-off all the same. Due to financial constraints Gilliam only had a year to shoot it, and on a shoestring budget at that. And it shows. It feels rushed in every sense and although the sets are intriguing, they appear as if they've been upcycled from other sets.

The real problem is the script: it's just not entertaining. A protagonist suffering from an existential struggle is a common theme for Gilliam, but this iteration is by far the weakest. Waltz does admirably well with the little he has, but even then there's nothing there that makes him remotely appealing. And the same can be said for all the other characters too.

Perhaps this venture into yet another dystopian world for Gilliam was just a step too far. On the surface it may attempt to also contemplate what the meaning of life is, but in doing so, it only draws the audience into wondering what the point of this particular film is. And the answer is all too evident: something close to zero.

Hopefully the pressure will be off somewhat now that this trilogy is concluded (albeit with more of a whimper than a bang) and Gilliam's imagination can be free now to create some new world, far more exciting than this one, to once again thrill audiences with.