I’d had the idea, for a couple of decades, that not seeing the rom-com Sleepless in Seattle, circa 1993, was a blot on my movie-viewing career.

I am a fan of When Harry Met Sally, and Nora Ephron wrote that movie as well as Sleepless. Meg Ryan played the female lead in both movies, and I like her, too. Billy Crystal (Harry) is funnier than Tom Hanks (Sleepless), of course, but Hanks can be comedic.

So, when I stumbled across Sleepless on YouTube, the whole of the movie, I clicked “play” and there I went.

And 106 minutes later … well, actually, more like 36 minutes later … I realized I had missed nothing, cinematically, but I was on my way to wasting 106 minutes of my life.

This is just a bad movie. Annoying, cloying and predictable.

And above all else, s-l-o-w. Glacially slow. Even the music is slow.

It was a different world in 1993, sure. Pretty much pre-internet, pre-terror. A simpler time.

But I have a hard time imagining our attention spans were so much longer, 22 years ago, that we could happily sit through Sleepless in Seattle and not feel our lives wasting away.

I will limit this to my five biggest problems with the film. Aside from the s-l-o-w thing.

1. Forty-five minutes of a glum Tom Hanks mourning the loss of his perfect wife is exhausting. Moping, moping, moping … it’s not a good look on Tom Hanks. And do women really find that attractive in a man? Like, is there no concern he may never get over the dead wife?

2. Bill Pullmann is over-the-top cliche as the wimpy guy Meg Ryan can abandon without our blaming her. His first “speaking” role may well have been three violent sneezes while meeting Ryan’s family, who inexplicably love the dullest (and most allergic) man in Baltimore.

3. Meg Ryan is given the all-inclusive spunky woman job of “reporter”, at the Baltimore Sun, of course. And at no time does she seem anything like a journalist. Maybe (maybe), Ephron gave her that job so she could dig around in other people’s business without seeming too much like a stalker, which doesn’t quite succeed anyway.

4. Hanks has the cliche “adorable and wise-beyond-his-years” kid with the perfect haircut who engineers the eventual meeting of Ryan and Hanks. (Of course he does.) And his stamp of approval on Ryan short-cuts any “kid might hate the step mom” concerns. (Of course it does.)

5. This rom-com is neither rom nor com. Hanks, who rarely has chemistry with his costars, aside from Wilson, is allowed to spend 97 percent of the movie away from Ryan, so we have only about five minutes of them in the same shot, not looking attracted to each other. Meanwhile, the whole of the movie is so predictable and the characters so humdrum that laughs are few and very far between. I chuckled at something about an hour in, and the sound of me laughing almost alarmed me.

Also, the movie seems to assume a deep familiarity with the 1957 movie An Affair to Remember, which I am fairly certain I had never heard before this movie.

The suggestion is that Ryan’s character is in her late 30s, which means her character would have been born in the 1960s, and it would be odd for someone that age to go back and look at Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr from 1957. (However, Ephron, born in 1941, would have been 16 when “Affair” came out.)

Anyway, supremely dull movie. Fails the test of time. If you haven’t seen it, don’t feel bad. Feel lucky.