Hola all. Massawyrm here.
There are really only a few things you need to know about WHEN IN ROME. The first is that it was written by the cancer-curing brain trust that brought you OLD DOGS, Davids Diamond & Weissman. And the second is that the script – no doubt written by these founding fathers on sheepskin parchment and handled on set by the only three virgins still living in California – was directed by Mark Steven Johnson, the man behind such classics as SIMON BIRCH and GHOST RIDER. Once you understand those two painful truths, you can begin to imagine the howling torment that this movie is capable of. Historically, January is a dumping ground for the industry’s worst movies – too terrible to see the light of day but too expensive to dump straight to video. In recent years, thanks in part to CLOVERFIELD, Hollywood has discovered that it is a month in which hits can be made, particularly in genre. So, for the most part, this year has been an experimentation year relatively free of the usual dump films – until now.
There isn’t one redeeming thing to found anywhere in this film. I can see a few ideas that might have been funny were they properly developed, but all told this is a classic example of a talented cast going to complete and utter waste in the hands of people unsure what exactly to do with them. The idea is a simple and sadly poorly executed one. Kristen Bell plays Beth, your run of the mill, featureless, rom-com protagonist. She’s a beautiful, work obsessed, modern gal with a really cool job – her only defining feature – who just can’t find the time to find the right man. To punctuate that it is her devotion to her job and not her social awkwardness that keeps her from settling down, she even has a mousey, plain jane assistant who appears more like Marcie from the Peanuts Gang than anyone else, reminding us that it’s not that she can’t GET a man, she just can’t KEEP one.
Enter the magical Roman fountain – yes you read that right – that not only can make people fall in love with one another, but also seems to be able to bend the laws of time and fucking space. When our little cardboard character gets frustrated with her inability to score, she gets drunk, bitter and starts plucking coins from the love fountain, causing every man whose coin she’s grabbed to fall in love with her. Fortunately for the sake of the film, all five of the men who put coins in the fountain IN FUCKING ROME ITALY also happen to magically show back up in New York City as residents. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Cupid no longer seems interested in the subtleties of romance, and instead sets loose a wild pack of stalkers on her ass.
In the right hands, this could have been a cute and clever comedy – one about a girl who has four coins and five suitors and needs to figure out which one is the real love. But no. She has five coins and one of the most blatantly telegraphed set ups for a third act twist I have ever seen in my entire life. It’s bad enough that you see it coming a mile off, but the fact that they somehow think you haven’t already figured it out and try to build genuine tension from it is enough to make you want to drive a screwdriver through your eye. The rest of the film from the moment Bell returns from Italy in the first act is about watching the goofy situations she ends up in at the hands of deranged, almost entirely unhinged suitors throwing themselves at her in ways that would get most people arrested.
Josh Duhamel plays the romantic lead who fortunately shares genuine chemistry with Bell, making the movie survivable, if still unwatchable. But Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard, and Danny DeVito all play over the top cartoons, each humiliating himself in one way or another – Heder most of all as he not only completely fumbles the film’s one clever character (a parody amalgam of Criss Angel and David Blaine), but goes so far as to make callbacks to his Napoleon Dynamite success by starring opposite Efren ‘Pedro’ Ramirez…for no apparent reason other than to make callbacks to his Napoleon Dynamite success.
Beyond predictable, this film gives away the few advantages it is playing with early on to make a painfully cloying, shoddy entry into the magical rom-com subgenre. There isn’t a thing about this movie worth mentioning in a positive light. Not one. Look, I like Mark Steven Johnson. I still hold the director’s cut of DAREDEVIL to be an underappreciated film and proof of what Johnson could get away with at a studio that had no idea how to make a superhero film. But Jesus, man. I didn’t think he was capable of making a worse movie than GHOST RIDER or SIMON BIRCH. But he just did. Seriously, avoid this movie at all costs. It has a very strong shot of ending up on my Worst of the Year list.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
Got something for the Wyrm? Mail it here.
