There's not much to this movie from a plot perspective, and few of the story beats are going to surprise anybody or say anything. But this is really an inversion of that idea, given that Alan is very much not Dash, and in a very funny sequence I really don't want to spoil, you get a chance to see him alongside a guy who is more like Dash, and the two could not be more different. The obvious reference here is Romancing the Stone, the 1984 film in which Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist who gets swept up in an adventure with Michael Douglas' on-the-nose rugged adventure hero. So it turns into an adventure-romcom, and of course they learn to like each other, and comedy ensues. When Alan - who does like Loretta, even though she doesn't like him at all - realizes she's in trouble, he decides to try to rescue her. Loretta is in the middle of blowing up her book tour when she is grabbed by a couple of dudes who work for a rich jerk named Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), whose reason for kidnapping Loretta relates to her academic work rather than her novels.