Lonely Planet: Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in a chemistry-free Lost in Translation rip-off

Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in Lonely Planet
Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in Lonely Planet - Netflix, Inc./Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/PA

Halloween is fast approaching and Netflix has very generously stitched together a chilling Frankenstein’s monster of a rom-com sure to keep audiences awake all night in a cold sweat. In Lonely Planet, the flayed cadaver of When Harry Met Sally is grafted to the freshly disinterred remains of Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation and sent shambling out into the world. Not even a reliably electrifying Laura Dern can spark life in a zom-com that flails about in a brain-dead stupor. It’s the scariest thing to hit streaming since the Nicole Kidman dance at the start of The Perfect Couple.

Dern is Katherine Loewe, a soon-to-be-divorced bestselling novelist en route to an authors’ retreat near Marrakesh, where she hopes a protracted spell of isolation will overcome her writer’s block. She seems to have not thought the plan through because the villa is also playing host to half a dozen other writers. They include performatively dewy-eyed Gen Z sensation Lily Kemp (Diana Silvers), who has brought her finance bro boyfriend Owen (Liam Hemsworth) along.

Hemsworth is the younger brother of Thor star Chris and achieves the impressive feat of being a less nuanced actor than an older sibling best known for waving his magic hammer in public. He’s supposedly playing a Tom Hanks-esque lost dork who lacks the heart for the casual cruelties of high finance and is falling out of love with Lily as her literary success unleashes her inner dinner-party luvvy. The problem is that Hemsworth isn’t so much Sleepless in Seattle as Moribund in Morocco. His plywood screen presence is the immovable object Dern’s committed performance cannot overcome.

They’re presented as spring-to-autumn star-crossed potential lovers. She’s adrift and uninspired. He’s increasingly fed up with his girlfriend – who publicly humiliates him at a late night drinking session with the other writers when it emerges he has no idea that “Pip” is a Dickens character.

The dynamic is straight from Lost In Translation, with Hemsworth the Scarlett Johansson-esque ingénue and Dern taking over from Bill Murray as the middle-aged grump surprised to discover they still have a heart beating under all the emotional scar tissue. The fatal flaw is that the leads simply don’t share a connection. Like two magnets repelling each other, they spend the film in a wary orbit. Dern had more in common with the mound of dinosaur poo in Jurassic Park.

In their defence, the actors are up against a script loaded with clunkers – and which, incredibly, is by experienced writer-director Susannah Grant, who received an Oscar nomination in 2001 for Erin Brockovich. “Be careful there – I could fall for a kid like you,” says Katherine as she and Owen share their first passionless snog. You can see Hemsworth actively fighting the instinct to roll his eyes.

There’s also a toe-curling callback to When Harry Met Sally as Owen, at a café, points to Katherine and tells the waiter, “I’ll have what’s she’s having”.  But misfiring dialogue is only part of the movie’s woes and you wonder if even Nora Ephron at the height of her powers could have saved this dreary disaster. Every rom-com lives or dies by the zing between its leads and the electricity between Dern and Hemsworth is somewhere to the far side of non-existent. There is no world where Lonely Planet’s howling absence of chemistry could have been salvaged.

15 cert, 96 minutes. On Netflix now