January isn’t even over and already we have a strong contender for the worst movie of the year. The atrocious romantic comedy “When in Rome” plumbs new depths for ineptitude in acting, directing, writing and every other department.
I wasn’t expecting much from a long-on-the-shelf movie from the writers of “Old Dogs” and the director of “Ghost Rider,” but I really wasn’t prepared to see the normally adorable Kristen Bell scrunch up her face into a perpetual scowl to play a workaholic curator at the Guggenheim.
Even by the extremely low standards of the genre, “When in Rome” gets failing marks for chemistry, credibility and even coherence. Title notwithstanding, most of the movie takes place in Manhattan, and even when Bell’s character travels to the Eternal City for her younger sister’s wedding, most of that is clearly faked.
MORE: PopWrap Interviews Kristen Bell!
PHOTOS: “WHEN IN ROME” FILMING IN NEW YORK
When, for no good reason, she takes five coins from a hilariously obvious soundstage fountain, a ridiculous curse makes five guys in the vicinity fall in love with her. Somehow, they all turn out to be Americans and stalk Bell when she returns to the Big Apple.
Talk about obnoxious losers: There’s a male model (Dax Shepard), a street magician (Jon Heder), an artist (Will Arnett) and a middle-aged sausage manufacturer (Danny DeVito).
Even if he didn’t have second billing, it’s not exactly a surprise that Bell is going to find Josh Duhamel the least objectionable of the bunch. He plays a Daily Snooze sports columnist who gets no closer to sports than awkward nightclub cameos by Lawrence Taylor and Shaquille O’Neal.
Nobody is given anything funny to say or do, and that goes triple for Kate Micucci, who seems to think she is positively hilarious as Bell’s grating assistant.
Even old pros like DeVito and Anjelica Huston, both directors themselves, can’t do anything with un-actable lines like “encased meat is my life’s work” and “there’s a nude mural of you on 82nd Street.”
Director Mark Steven Johnson’s action sequences for “Ghost Rider” and “Daredevil” were no great shakes, but the guy truly has no clue how to stage or shoot comedy. On the single occasion when the script comes up with an original idea — a restaurant where patrons eat in the dark — the results are laugh-free.
Indeed, the entire movie (which shows signs of extensive post-production tinkering) looks like it was directed at gunpoint by someone wearing a blindfold.
Disney is cynically advertising this expensive-looking train wreck as “from the studio that gave you ‘The Proposal.’ ”
What the ads don’t mention is that back in December, that same studio justifiably fired the management team responsible for “When in Rome.”