“What If” is a case of the cutes the way the Black Death was a case of infectious disease. The movie is saturated with cute, teeming with cute, rancid with cute. I’d endured all a man could fairly be expected to take when I glanced at my watch and realized there were still 95 minutes to go.
Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan team up for “When Harry (Potter) Met Sally,” an almost majestically formulaic rom-com that forgot the most important line in the formula: You have to come up with a plausible reason why the two sweeties can’t hook up.
He is Wallace, an ex-med student in Toronto who, seconds into the film, is already swapping “adorable” banter with Chantry (Kazan) as the two play with kitchen-poetry magnets.
Wallace is brokenhearted about catching his girl making out with a teacher, while Chantry has a live-in boyfriend (Rafe Spall) who, a minute or two after we meet him, tumbles out of a second-floor window, because it’s wacky. He’s weirdly intense, the two have nothing in common and he gets packed off to Dublin early on anyway. All of the flirtation is between Chantry and Wallace as the boyfriend fades into the background.
Every so often Adam Driver, as Wallace’s buddy, shows up to deliver dull-witted Monologues on Love and why hopeless Wallace won’t find it, and Chantry’s slutty, beautiful sister Dalia (Megan Park) throws herself at Wallace to no avail. The thing holding Wallace and Chantry back? When they met, they decided to be friends.
Aggressively cute movie tricks soak up screen time: Wallace keeps climbing up on his roof to gaze at the stars, a doodle made by Chantry (an animator) comes to life and starts flying around the neighborhood, and a discussion of exes is punctuated with images of boyfriends and girlfriends popping up on screen a la “The Brady Bunch.” When people keep bringing up a peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwich called “Fool’s Gold,” it’s exactly like a running joke, except it isn’t funny.
Kazan is charming, but Radcliffe’s proving to be a nonentity as an adult actor, though no amount of presence could redeem the excruciating script by Elan Mastai. Each tiresome character talks about the same subjects (pop culture and love), at the same speed (frantic), while sounding like the same person: a desperate writer clawing at your shoulder in an elevator, sweatily unloading his idea of witty banter. “Wait, let me give you my bit on poop and celebrities. No? How about why one guy is like a rotten banana and another is like a nacho? Wait, don’t go! I’ve got this genius riff on alternate names for Cool Whip!”
Gradually, and then quickly, the cuteness slips from “unfunny” to “annoying” to a kind of low-grade human rights violation, like being made to sit through the piano recital of a bunch of 5-year-olds you don’t know, or open mike night at the worst comedy club in Tallahassee, or being held hostage by mimes.