Soon into Hector and the Search for Happiness, the baffling new leading man vehicle for Simon Pegg from director Peter Chelsom (The Hannah Montana Movie), I realised why the ‘dramedic’ inertia felt so familiar. Hector has much in common with last year’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a Ben Stiller film which was remarkable for recreating perfectly in cinematic form the polished emptiness of a high-end credit card commercial. Both are adaptations of a literary work (here, a popular 2002 novel by Francois Lelord), both use a well-known comic actor for a slightly straighter role, and both are about…