Movie Reviews

Hector (Simon Pegg) is a discontent psychiatrist who kind of sleepwalks through his days. As he tells his girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike), he feels like a fraud giving advice to his clients on how to better their lives while he isn’t happy with the way his own life is working out. And so he sets out on a journey that will take him all over the world to find out what exactly makes people happy.

Along the way he meets a multitude of eccentric characters including a hedonistic millionaire (Stellan Skarsgård), a happy hooker (Ming Zhao), a Buddhist monk, a French drug lord (Jean Reno) and a scientist studying the cell structure of bliss (Christopher Plummer). They all hand Hector little nuggets of ‘wisdom’ which he diligently copies down in his notebook, allowing director Peter Chelsom (Serendipity) to insert small animations.

There honestly is not a lot to like about this movie and it doesn’t exactly help things that it drags on for nearly two hours. The story pretty much boils down to one of those terrible self-help books that is aspiring to be a comedy and Pegg’s childlike enthusiasm makes him look like a complete tool. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between this movie and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty and paired up against one another, Hector would most definitely get his ass handed to him. Hell, even Eat Pray Love would knock the shit out of this movie!