What Happens Later

★★✩✩✩

Reviewed by John Nathan

During the credits for Meg Ryan’s return to the screen as actor and director, the star of three of the greatest rom coms ever made — Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and the peerless When Harry Met Sally — dedicates her new film to their still much-missed creator Nora Ephron.

The name-check is a thank you Ryan has said. But it is unlikely that were she alive Ephron would thank her back for attaching her name to this sadly undazzling dross.

Ryan will always be loved for her part in When Harry Met Sally’s  “I’ll have what she’s having” moment of rom-com history. Yet she reportedly struggled to get her latest film funded before she decided to star in it, and it is very quickly obvious why.

Her cache as a comedy star also attracted David Duchovny to the ill-conceived project.

They play former lovers Bill and Willa (short for Wilhelmina) who are stranded in a remote airport by “the snow storm of the century” 25 years after they split.

Old scores are settled; flames are reignited. Granted, there is (just enough) chemistry generated to make the film’s 100 minutes go tolerably.

However the folly of adapting Steven Dietz’s 2008 play called Shooting Star for cinema is very quickly obvious.

In an intimate theatre the conceit of this two hander can obviously work well. Dietz’s dialogue is sharp, funny and unflinchingly dissects a failed relationship that for both parties turns out to be the best they ever had.

Here though Ryan reaches for rom-com tropes in the hope of compensating for the fatally un-cinematic source material. Alas, few hit the mark either for rom or com.

The running gag of an airport announcer responding archly to the couple’s heaven-directed complaints about their circumstances falls flat every time.

Worse, the suggestion that with all that needs to be done in the world universal forces have taken the time to bring these two together is almost offensive.

One to avoid even while waiting for a delayed flight.