Overnight

A confined space and mismatched characters forced together are the recipe for “Overnight,” a wan comedy about passengers on an overnight cross-country flight. They’re all looking for love, or to hang onto love, or to justify their love. Director Valerie Breiman gives us Jenny (Rachel Blanchard), fresh from ending her romance with a guy who has a girlfriend on each coast. There’s Tom, the hip British physics professor (James D’Arcy) fleeing the West Coast, where his ex just won’t accept that she’s his ex. Rude and grumpy TMJ (Gbenga Akinnagbe) is a rapper forced to fly commercial because he’s transporting a lap dog to his East Coast girlfriend. Amir (Maz Jobrani) and Mohammed (Mousa Kraish) are trying to not let all the profiling ruin their trip. And Captain Brody (Anthony LaPaglia) is managing an ongoing cell-phone rant with his wife, so wrapped up in his calls that he shares them over the aircraft’s public address system. His fundamentalist co-pilot (Tom Hodges) is no help. Breiman tosses these broad characters together and tries to set off sparks. Few do. It’s all blandly predictable. The twists let us stay two steps ahead. “Overnight” makes for a dull if not entirely intolerable trip, one mercifully shorter than a real cross-country flight. Though not by much.