Early of their acquaintanceship, Owen (Liam Hemsworth) confesses to Katherine (Laura Dern) that he doesn’t actually look after journey. “Individuals at all times say it’s going to be this transformative expertise. Go to a brand new, unique place, meet the brand new, unique you,” he says. “However you get there and also you’re not new or unique. You’re simply you.”

Lonely Planet being what it’s, Owen will after all be confirmed unsuitable. This journey that they’re on in Morocco, actually will change their lives, particularly by tossing them right into a whirlwind courtship. But when the Netflix romance depicts a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, the expertise of truly watching it’s decidedly extra mundane. Neither boring sufficient to be painful nor enjoyable sufficient to be partaking, it’s just too bland to make a lot of an impression in any respect.

Really, that’s not fully honest. There may be one factor writer-director Susannah Grant (an Oscar nominee for Erin Brockovich) does very persuasively, and that’s pitch Morocco as a trip vacation spot. From the second Katherine pulls as much as her writers’ retreat, we’re guided by one postcard-ready tableau after one other: luxurious rooms furnished in elaborately patterned silks, majestic ruins steeped in centuries of historical past, fairly streets lined with watercolor-blue partitions. The views from the kasbah, nestled deep within the hills outdoors Marrakech, are uniformly spectacular. As fellow attendee Lily (Diana Silvers) gasps to Owen, the finance-bro boyfriend she’s introduced alongside for the experience: “You may see eternally.”

Positive, there’s the occasional inconvenience, together with automobile engine bother and a minor bout of meals poisoning. However even these setbacks change into blessings in disguise — by which I imply romance narrative contrivances so clunky, I briefly puzzled if Lonely Planet would possibly reveal itself to be a a lot weirder film a couple of hostess toying together with her visitors’ love lives for her personal nefarious ends. (It isn’t. Alas.)

Although Katherine has are available a determined try to complete her novel, she’s compelled out of her room when she discovers the tap isn’t working and she or he has no water. Although Owen’s simply there to help Lily, spotty cell service forces him outdoors as nicely. The pair appear mutually intrigued from the second their eyes meet; they strike up a quick friendship that inevitably blossoms into one thing extra.

Ostensibly, Katherine and Owen are drawn collectively by the moment and ineffable ease they really feel with each other. Actually, although, what appears to unite them is the truth that they’re in any other case surrounded by assholes, Lily included.

Lonely Planet’s depiction of elite authors may rely as scathing satire if the movie had a sharper knack for element, or any humorousness. When these scribes aren’t falling throughout themselves to flatter each other, they’re brazenly sneering at Owen for failing to recollect the identify of a personality from Nice Expectations. Solely Katherine treats him with primary courtesy, not to mention real curiosity in his ideas, his emotions, his highschool recollections, his present work issues. (Although in equity, even he doesn’t appear all that concerned with his personal personal fairness job.)

In any other case, the pair share solely a gentle and inconsistent chemistry. Katherine is written with out a lot in the best way of a character, however the ever-reliable Dern is nonetheless in a position to anchor her in an earthy type of appeal. Owen is much more sketchily drawn, maybe as a result of he’s actually simply the vessel for her wishes, and Hemsworth is much less able to making the character his personal. To the top, it’s a job that feels prefer it may have been performed by some other conventionally good-looking 30something dude in Hollywood.

Collectively, they arrive throughout like two good sufficient individuals having a pleasant sufficient time, however hardly a deep or passionate one. Even their climactic love scenes are lower than stimulating, provided that each leads are buried in a lot shadow and uneven enhancing I discovered myself questioning how a lot of them had been being carried out by physique doubles. Then once more, closeups aren’t actually the movie’s robust swimsuit both. Whether or not attributable to a trick of lighting, make-up or precise VFX work, there are moments when the actors look so airbrushed as to look not fairly actual.

However such halfheartedness appears half and parcel with the remainder of the movie, which makes virtually no effort to think about Owen and Katherine’s worlds outdoors their connection. Although there are one or two scenes set after the journey, we spend no time within the characters’ actual properties or with their non-vacation mates. (Certainly, I’m unsure we ever truly study what cities they reside in.) Heck, even supposing Katherine’s author’s block is the catalyst for this whole journey, we don’t even get to study what sort of books she writes — simply that they’re critically acclaimed and commercially profitable.

In broad strokes, Lonely Planet matches proper in with this 12 months’s mini-trend of older woman-younger boyfriend romances, alongside The Thought of You, A Household Affair and the upcoming Babygirl. And although it by no means immediately addresses the age hole, it does technically ship on the dream of assembly a scorching younger factor who will get you intellectually, emotionally and sexually in a means nobody else ever has.

However the true want success it’s promoting is a far sillier one. It’s of attending to be that “new and unique” particular person you turn into whereas touring for good, with out the pesky realities of your back-home life ever really getting in the best way. It’s, in brief, a fantasy that you just would possibly get to reside in your trip eternally. Perhaps even in balmy, lovely Morocco.