The nerdy charm and comic chops Simon Pegg showed in films like “At World’s End’’ get smothered in a vat of stale schmaltz in this lethal midlife-crisis dramedy about a successful London psychiatrist with a gorgeous girlfriend (Rosamund Pike) who decides he needs to travel around the world to discover “happiness.’’
After a stop in China for a night with a high-end call girl and a visit to a monastery equipped with Skype, our endlessly aphorism-spouting hero spends two weeks tending to the medical needs of natives of an unspecified African nation before being captured by thugs. En route to Los Angeles for a reunion with an old flame, he comforts a woman dying from cancer on the plane.
Even with appearances by such dependable performers as Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgård, Christopher Plummer and Jean Reno, the interminable “Hector and the Search for Happiness’’ will most likely inspire audiences to search for the exit door.