Few actors convey world-weariness as effortlessly as veteran French star Jean Reno. At best, he looks like he's just been roused from a drunken sleep. At worst, he looks like he's been resurrected from the grave and isn't too happy about it. The same haggard qualities that make Reno a natural at playing jaded cops and scruffy criminals make him an unlikely choice for a romantic lead, but in Jet Lag, he's pressed into leading-man duty, with depressingly mediocre results. The second directorial effort from veteran screenwriter Danièle Thompson, the film casts Reno as a successful but unhappy chef turned international businessman who wears his neuroses and hang-ups like a protective emotional shield. Those defenses are eventually challenged by beautician Juliette Binoche, who asks to borrow Reno's cell phone in an airport and, through a convoluted set of circumstances, ends up spending a night in a hotel room with him. Diametrical opposites, the prickly, remote Reno and the warm, emotional Binoche initially despise each other, but in true romantic-comedy form, that hate morphs into love, albeit in stunningly abrupt, unconvincing fashion. Reno and Binoche seem to be fighting not because they're struggling with their attraction, but because they genuinely dislike one another, and with good reason. They all too effectively convey their characters' disdain; it's the attraction part that trips them up, although that's more the script's fault than the actors'. Jet Lag jumps straight from hatred to love without its protagonists growing to like each other, making it feel like the romantic equivalent of time-lapse photography. The irresistible force of Binoche's beauty and charm meets the immovable object of Reno's misanthropic neuroses in Jet Lag, but the unseen hand of romantic-comedy conventions is what determines the familiar arc of their relationship.