Why have Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder never become staples of romantic comedy. Are they too serious for rom? Too cool for com? Or, with the release of this indulgently talky borderline pretentious wedding comedy do we learn the truth: that they’re hopeless romantics, genuinely rubbish at it? A couple of scenes in Destination Wedding fall so calamitously flat I had the disconcerting sensation I was watching the film dubbed in a foreign language or for a spoofed internet meme.

Ryder and Reeves play cynical wedding guests who meet for the first time at the airport en route to the nuptials, which the happy couple are presumptuously hosting at a Californian vineyard, expecting everyone to fork out for a weekend break. It’s hate at first sight. Ryder plays Lindsay, the groom Keith’s bitter ex-fiancee, still nursing a broken heart six years after he dumped her. (Though she recognises he’s a jerk: “God gave more sense to a toaster.”) As Frank, Keith’s emotionally clammed up estranged half-brother, Reeves gives a blank performance even by his standards of Zen-like expressionlessness – even though his stream of diatribes on the absurdities of life and love provide the best gags. Asked if his mother was born during the depression, he deadpans: “No, she caused it.” The film zeroes in on the pair; everyone else is an extra.

Lindsay and Frank are outsiders at the wedding, invited out of a sense of duty – randoms seated together. Lindsay prattles. Frank looks bored. Somehow, over the course of 72 hours they fall in love. At least, that’s what the script says. I think Reeves looked more fondly at the puppy in John Wick than Ryder here. The two actors have appeared together twice before – in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and A Scanner Darkly – but their onscreen chemistry has gone south; the magnet to metal pull is gone. With Destination Wedding, it’s third time unlucky.