And now, ladies and gentlemen, comes one of the year’s most insufferable movies, Hector and the Search for Happiness. Simon Pegg’s collaboration with Edgar Wright has resulted in some of the best comedies of the last 10 years: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End. Away from Wright, however, Pegg’s track record has been somewhat mixed. This disastrous comedy based on a French novel by François Lelord shows him at his absolute worst.
He plays Hector, a London psychiatrist who doesn’t feel like he’s making his patients any better. He decides to address his professional crisis by traveling around the world for an indefinite period of time and researching what makes people happy, leaving his girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike) in a state of suspension and warning him that she won’t wait for him forever.
This film was actually released back in September but is re-opening this week at AMC Grapevine Mills because Gone Girl has made Pike famous. She really should do more comedy — I’ve never thought all that much of her in dramatic roles, but she was really funny as a dim bulb in An Education and alongside Pegg in The World’s End. Here she gets a nice bit when she reacts to Hector’s query “Are you happy?” by thinking it’s a prelude to him breaking up with her. She slips easily into the role of a frumpy, bespectacled hausfrau who nevertheless knows she looks good in her lingerie, but the role doesn’t allow much more than that.
The show unfortunately belongs to Pegg, who re-teams with director Peter Chelsom after their collaboration in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Something about Chelsom seems to bring out the worst in Pegg as an actor, encouraging him to bug out his eyes and mug like there’s no tomorrow. It doesn’t help that Hector acts like an entitled, blundering tourist through the whole thing. He’s so stupid that you want to shake him, the way a Euro smuggler (Jean Reno) actually does after Hector starts asking questions about his occupation. His encounter with a Chinese party girl (Zhao Ming) shows him to be not only hopelessly naïve but also a thoroughly dislikable cheater, while a Buddhist monk (Togo Igawa) and an American professor (Christopher Plummer) conspire to teach Hector canards about self-fulfillment that would be too mushy for a greeting card.
Chelsom handles this all with such tone-deafness that he keeps going for laughs even after Hector is thrown into an African prison and tortured. Oh, and he trots out an ancient joke when a foreigner insists on pronouncing “happiness” as “a penis.” This movie will make you want to spend 114 minutes listening to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” on a loop, because that would be a better use of your time.
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Hector and the Search for Happiness
Starring Simon Pegg and Rosamund Pike. Directed by Peter Chelsom. Written by Maria von Heland, Peter Chelsom, and Tinker Lindsay, based on François Lelord’s novel. Rated R.
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