I didn’t have any reason to hope that Peter Chelsom’s Héctor and the Search for Happiness was going to be a good film.
I mean, after having made Hannah Montana: The Movie and Shall We Dance?, what were the odds? But I thought: maybe it’s so bad, that it’s good — you know, sort of a guilty pleasure. Well, it’s not. To be exact, it ranks in the top five worst US films I’ve seen in a long time. And that’s an understatement.
The so-called story in a nutshell: Héctor (Simon Pegg) is a boring and bored psychiatrist whose life hasn’t seen any changes in years. Despite having a gorgeous girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) he’s unsatisfied and unfulfilled. So one day he has a great idea: to search the globe to find the secret of happiness. That is for his own benefit, for that of his girlfriend and his patients.
First problem: Héctor and the Search of Happiness pretends it has a storyline, but it actually doesn’t. Instead, it has an arbitrary series of loosely connected moronic situations in different countries. Each is meant as some kind of life-affirming experience to get some ideas on how to achieve happiness. Each is more overworked than the previous one.
So Héctor is nothing but a cliché walking among clichés.
Then expect high-class (and regretful) prostitutes, mobsters, hectic nights and neon lights in China. Expect filthy rich businessmen who do the right thing for a change. Expect exotic milieus and lots of photos. Then you get to Africa, filled with poverty and hunger, uncivilized (but colourful and musical), overcrowded and dirty but, above all, in dire need of help from good white men — medical doctors preferred. You get the idea.
Shot as a travelogue, with a condescending and pious gaze, Chelsom’s feature fails at every level: from the underwritten screenplay to the pedestrian direction, with no sense of comic timing and no genuine pathos (this is a wannabe dramatic comedy).
Meant to be humanistic and enlightening, it’s actually downright insulting as mere broadstrokes address intricate issues. So how can you care for a film that doesn’t work as neither a comedy nor a drama? Worst of all, it’s not even campy.
Production notes
Héctor and the Search for Happiness (US, 2014). Directed by Peter Chelsom. Written by Maria von Heland, Peter Chelsom, Tinker Lindsay. With Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, Toni Collette, Christopher Plummer. Cinematography by Kolja Brandt. Music by Dan Mangan, Jesse Zubot. Produced by John Albanis, Christian Angermayer, Kim Arnott. Distributed by: Buena Vista. NR. Running time: 99 minutes.
