A feel-good movie that’s bound to make you feel absolutely awful, this slick but sappy adaptation of Francois Lelord’s novel will appeal only to those who consider bromides like “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” to represent deep thoughts. Following one man’s globe-trotting effort to find the secret to inner fulfillment, “Hector and the Search for Happiness” proves a truly excruciating journey.

Simon Pegg stars as Hector, a London psychiatrist whose life with his girlfriend Clara (Rosamund Pike), a pharmaceutical marketer, is rigidly ordered and predictable and who’s dissatisfied with his work, feeling that his treatment of his comically broad patients is fruitless. (You might compare Hector’s professional situation to that of Bob Hartley in the old Bob Newhart show—the shots of him walking to work even mimic the program’s opening credits—except that Hector suffers what amounts to a breakdown himself, screaming at his patients about what he considers their trivial complaints.) So he decides to take off on a solo trip in which he hopes to find the secret to being truly happy. Clara is supportive, but let’s face it, his decision is really a slap in the face to her.

Anyway, Hector’s journey of discovery takes him first to Shanghai, where a rich, dour businessman named Edward (Stellan Skarsgard) introduces him to the city’s fleshpots. (Why the guy should take any interest in such a naïve little nudnik is never satisfactorily explained—at one point he says that Hector’s precisely the sort of guy he’d ordinarily avoid like the plague—but then logic is not the story’s strong suit.) There Hector falls for a beauty (Ming Zhao) who turns out to be—you guessed it—a call girl. That leads him to record his first jewel of enlightenment in his notebook: “Happiness means not knowing the whole story.”

Unhappily, the filmmakers choose not to observe that nugget of wisdom and instead proceed to follow Hector’s further misadventures, first with a monk (Togo Igawa) in a remote monastery and then with an old college buddy, Michael (Barry Atsma) who runs a clinic in Africa. There he learns the joy of family with Marie Louise (S’Twandiwe Kgoroge), a woman he met on a white-knuckle flight into the interior, and the dangers that can come from expatriate Europeans like Diego Baresco (Jean Reno) and from a ruthless local warlord (Akim Omotoso). Then it’s off the Los Angeles to visit with Agnes (Toni Collette), his old college flame and now a happily-married wife and mother, although on the plane he takes time to minister to a dying woman (Chantel Herman), from he of course learns important life lessons. Hector’s last stop, before returning home to Clara, is with the renowned Professor Coreman (Christopher Plummer), who’s invented a machine that can disclose the range of emotions within the human brain. One can be grateful the device doesn’t show what’s going on in the cerebra of viewers, which by this time are probably largely given over to anger.

Writer-director Peter Chelsom tries to spruce up Hector’s increasingly irritating experiences—which are nonetheless nicely shot in widescreen by Kolja Brandt—with occasional eruptions of cutesy animation that, among other things, include in huge letters the banalities he learns along the way. It somehow makes the material even less appealing. And throughout the cast is poorly employed. Pegg, who can ordinarily be expected to add a touch of edginess to even a bland role, seems totally at a loss here, but probably no one could have done much with so ill-conceived a character as Hector. Skarsgard and Reno are wasted in parts that require both of them to do little more than growl, and Plummer coasts on his elder-clout. Pike and Collette, however, manage to remain attractive presences even though they’re stuck in parts that reek of old-fashioned notions of what a woman ought to be. That stereotyping is symptomatic of all the secondary characters on view here, who merely serve as simplistic types for Hector to deal with rather than multi-dimensional individuals.

Anybody searching for pleasure at the multiplex is strenuously advised to seek elsewhere than this hectoring misfire.