Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor star in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. (CBS Films)

Lasse Hallström’s rom-com drama Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a movie of contrasts: Middle East vs. West, bureaucracy vs. cute couple, man vs. nature, faith vs. science, rom-com vs. satire. That’s more than enough material to make for incisive commentary and/or sexual tension. But none of these threads takes hold long enough for the viewer to care. The movie’s 107 minutes don’t swim upstream so much as flounder in a bucket of chum.

Salmon Fishing is based on a book by Paul Torday, who wrote it as a modern variation on the epistolary novel by composing it entirely of emails, text messages and other forms of digital communication. The novel won the 59-year-old first-time author the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing, but the screen adaptation by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) isn’t very funny, and fails to create a compelling world from its disembodied missives. These digital smoke signals survive in the movie as words come to life on screen in texts, IMs, emails and subtitles. None of these will win any prizes on this side of the pond.

The movie’s basic premise is one that the characters themselves find implausible. Career bureaucrat/fisheries expert Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) is recruited to take on the titular project. Billionaire Yemeni Sheikh Muhammed (Amr Waked) built a costly dam to irrigate his people’s dry land. A dedicated angler, the Sheikh’s hopes to bring salmon fishing to Yemenis. Emily Blunt plays Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, the Sheik’s investment representative. Ms. Chetwode-Talbot (which is how Jones addresses her, in what passes for classic rom-com sophistication) pines for a soldier boyfriend called to a secret operation in Afghanistan three weeks after she meets him; Jones is in a loveless marriage to a career-minded Mary (Rachel Stirling). Will they find love with each other? Will you care?

The wheels are set in motion by the prime minister’s press secretary Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), a stern type-A in search of the right human interest story to quell Middle East tensions, or at least to make the Brits look good on TV. Maxwell’s bureaucratic machinations treat the couples’ hearts like pawns in the game of international relations — at least that’s how we’re supposed to feel. The leads are likable but the chemistry never really gels, their motivations flimsy. And if the film’s producers hope to foster understanding between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, they’ve done a lousy job of humanizing the Yemeni people, who are depicted as one visionary billionaire Sheik, a handful of blood-thirsty rivals and dozens of servants.

To be fair, the Brits don’t come off much better.

Amr Waked and McGregor.

The screenplay uses the Sheik, always clutching prayer beads, to offer up this grand scheme as a question of faith. But if faith moves mountains, $50 million moves 10,000 farmed salmon, which is what it takes for the crazy scheme to work. The film may talk about faith but it shows that the answer to realizing your dreams lies not in a higher power, but in Swiss bank accounts. Man realizes that his domain over nature is not tenable and there is one moment of self-awareness: Sheikh Muhammed shows Jones the expensive dam he built and laments: “I thought I built this to glorify God; but now I fear it was to glorify man.” It’s the funniest line in the movie.

I can be pretty forgiving of rom-coms. Personalities and chemistry can overcome formulaic scripts. Despite having to navigate howlers like “you write for that that blog on the internet,” Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis put Friends With Benefits over enough that I plotzed at Kriss-Kross. But if there was a moment in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen were there isn’t supposed to be a dry eye in the house, it didn’t find me. Terry Stacey’s cinematography, especially in warmly lit evening shots, makes it a lovely film to look at, but certain digital special effects add contrivances no other rom-com would touch, and for good reason. It’s not cricket to specify, but let’s just say that the supposedly inspiring scene made me wish the movie had been called Free Ten Thousand Willies.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Written by Simon Beaufoy
Starring Emily Blunt, Ewan MacGregor, Kirstin Scott Thomas.
Running time: 107 minutes.
Rated PG-13 for some violence and sexual content and brief language.
Opens today at Landmark’s E Street and Bethesda Row cinemas.