Sequels made of successful films are always dicey prospects from the outset. In Hollywood, more often than not, they exist because the producers are trying to wring more sales out of a winning combination (see Oceans 12, 13 . . . no, wait, don’t). But it’s much harder to make the case for an independent production going that route.

Hal Hartley created some marvelous, indelible characters almost 10 years ago in Henry Fool, and his motivations for making this sequel seem artistically genuine: He liked the characters and simply wanted to keep the story going.

If only he had actually done that. Instead, he switches genres entirely and inexplicably excludes some of the strongest elements of the first film. As it is, all he proves with Fay Grim is that stories have to end, and this one was blissfully over and done with years before he started writing it.

It’s pointless to talk about Fay Grim without first going over Henry Fool. In Hal Hartley’s quirky, stylized masterpiece, hapless garbageman Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is befriended by the brusquely charming, garrulous ex-con Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). Henry has been writing a novel he calls his “confessions,” his life’s work painstakingly written by hand in a series of notebooks. He gives Simon a blank notebook and some encouragement, which motivates the garbageman to write the great American poem. Unfortunately for Henry, his novel turns out to be crap. Around this time, Henry also knocks up Simon’s caustic sister Fay (Parker Posey).

The sequel picks up 10 years later, when Henry’s long gone, Fay is raising his kid by herself, and Simon is serving time in jail for reasons I won’t go into. Then Jeff Goldblum shows up as an FBI man, and Fay learns that her husband was really a government agent and what he was writing was actually a secret code. Now Fay has the notebooks, which various governments the world over are willing to kill for. The film is thrown face first into the difficult genre of spy satire as all sorts of international intrigue ensues.

In one swift maneuver, Hartley undones everything that made the first film great. Not only is Thomas Jay Ryan’s fascinating character absent for the bulk of the film, he has been pointlessly rehabilitated. The initial story worked because Henry was ultimately an idiot who disguised himself as a genius. Now we are told that the opposite was really true all along. It raises tricky questions, such as: Why didn’t Henry take the books with him when he left if they were so important? And if they were really just filled up with coded messages surrounded by gibberish, why was he so surprised and disappointed when they were turned down by the publisher?

Perhaps if Henry had been around more in the sequel to try to work out some of these discrepancies, and to help convince us that he really was a figure of intrigue and not a loser, the idea might have been brought to fruition in an interesting way. Instead, it falls on everyone else in the cast to make that case for him. The result is a mythologizing of Henry that is interesting, but happens at the expense of every other character. Fay, who in Henry Fool was just a slutty, confused firebrand, is thrust into the role of a wacky but heroic spy, dubiously motivated by love for her husband. Simon, who could barely speak in the first film, sits at home watching Fay’s kid and playing sleuth with Goldblum.

The paradox here is that if you haven’t seen the first film, and you take the characters at face value the way they are drawn in Fay Grim, it holds up okay as the crazed, somewhat shallow espionage romp it intends to be. However, if you’ve seen Henry Fool, this sequel is just ridiculous.

It certainly doesn’t help that Hartley’s signature stagy style robs the proceedings of believability. Posey is often caught literally posing as she recites her lines, the camera set at unlikely, self-conscious angles. In Henry Fool, Hartley’s quirks added a subtle element of surreality that helped make the plainly drawn characters more vibrant. Inspired scenes in the original—like the one where Henry is sitting on the toilet with explosive diarrhea, holding a ring in his hand, and Fay gets out of the shower and thinks he is proposing—are replaced with standard chase sequences, faux-terse dialogue and talky exposition.

This is the worst-case scenario for a sequel: Instead of enhancing the story from the original, it ruins it. Hartley is assuming you’ve seen Henry Fool 10 years ago and just need a bit of a reminder of what happened, so the entire ending of that film is given away in tedious backstory scenes. Your best bet is to go rent Henry Fool if you haven’t already seen it. And if you have, skip Fay Grim, or approach it with your expectations protectively lowered.