Don't search for happiness in 'Hector'

What would it take to make you happy? To experience that emotion truly, deeply, utterly, “as a state of being,” as a character puts it in “Hector and the Search for Happiness”?

If your answer was more money, a new job, better sex or stronger drugs — or maybe reconnecting with your first love, the one who got away — you're like the film's title character, a successful but vaguely unsatisfied man who suddenly chucks everything, including his beautiful, adoring girlfriend (Rosamund Pike), to go gallivanting around the world in search of something that — surprise! — turns out to have nothing to do with any of that stuff.

Based on a 2002 book by French shrink-turned-pop-novelist Franois Lelord, “Hector” is as light as the punch line from a “Peanuts” cartoon, despite a sequence in which our hero (Simon Pegg) is kidnapped and beaten by a violent African warlord (Akin Omotoso).

Consider yourself warned: Although the trailer makes the movie look like a comedy, it's less than a laugh riot.

After being released from that cheerful little interlude, Hector skips down the street as the words “Happiness is feeling completely alive” crawl across the screen. Hector keeps a running tally of various theories of happiness he has hit upon during his globe-trotting “research,” each of which appears as a handwritten scribble on screen, as a way of closing the chapters.

Much of it is about as profound as a greeting card, and one theory is quite crass. “Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at the same time,” Hector writes, after spending a (chaste) night with a hot Chinese hooker (Ming Zhao), just before she is forcibly removed by her abusive pimp.

Hector's other encounters include meeting a rich, cynical banker (Stellan Skarsgard); an old friend (Barry Atsma) who has become an aid worker after coming out as gay; a ruthless drug lord (Jean Reno) with a mentally ill wife; a woman (Chantel Herman) dying of cancer; and a wise old monk (Togo Igawa).

Just about all the people Hector runs into have sage advice or a life lesson to offer. They're straight out of Central Casting.

Where is the airplane seatmate with body odor and a boring story about a business meeting in Sacramento?

Why is everyone in this movie, except Hector, either an enlightened being or a heartless thug?

As naive as the main character is — and he's shockingly unsophisticated for a former medical school student — the movie is even more clueless. You can see the plot turns coming from a mile away.

There are no surprises here, only blandly reassuring homilies.

Spoiler alert: Happiness has to do with loving others and self-acceptance. If that's something you have to fly to Shanghai to find out, save yourself the airfare and see this movie instead.

“Hector and the Search for Happiness”

★ ½

<b>Starring:</b> Simon Pegg, Toni Collette, Jean Reno, Rosamund Pike, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard

<b>Directed by:</b> Peter Chelsom

<b>Other:</b> A Relativity Media release. Rated R for language, sexual situations and violence. 114 minutes