Moonshot (2022)

Directed by Chris Winterbauer. Starring Cole Sprouse, Lana Condor, Emily Rudd, Zach Braff, Mason Gooding, Michelle Buteau, Cameron Esposito, Christine Adams, Sunita Deshpande, (voice) Peter Woodward. [PG-13]

Anemic, overlong rom-com of two near-strangers traveling to Mars to be with their significant others…or, in the case of Sprouse, some girl he spent a few hours with one evening. He plays Walt, irritating as a smarmy tick, who attaches himself to Condor’s Sophie, a pragmatic student who gives in to capricious impulse and buys a ticket for the next shuttle heading to Mars where boyfriend Gooding just accepted an extended assignment to work there; Walt can’t afford a ticket (and has been rejected as a candidate for a student placement program a whopping thirty-seven times) so he stows away and convinces Sophie to go along with a ruse where he pretends to be Gooding’s character during the flight. All of the futuristic furbelows are on hand solely to make this charmless time-killer seem slightly more fresh and inventive than it is, which is not at all; instead, it’s just the same rote formula of dislike-to-love transitions, kooky supporting characters, manufactured drama and misunderstandings, cloying pop songs, false crises, and so on. To be fair, it does contain two or three legitimately humorous moments of the off-kilter variety (“Unfortunately, I’ve just learned that our scheduled speaker, Dr. Franklin Dearborn, has come down with a mild case of…space madness”), but to be honest, the leads aren’t even likable individually, so there’s no forgiving their complete absence of romantic chemistry; rarely has a climactic kiss felt more like it was between sibling actors who discovered too late that they signed on to the wrong project.

36/100