When In Rome

I don’t understand how so many hilarious people can make such an unfunny movie. I spent most of the film shaking my head. The premiss is interesting. After a romantic disappointment at her sister’s wedding, a frustrated young woman jumps into the famous Trevi fountain in Rome. In a drunken conversation with the fountain goddess, she decides to spare others from the pain of love by plucking their coins out of the fountain and putting them in her purse. When she does so, five men she has never met, save one, have now become her love slaves. They will follow her to the ends of the earth until she returns the coins to the fountain, or hands them back to the gentlemen themselves.

Kristen Bell spends the next part of the movie running from Will Arnet, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard and Danny Devito. Meanwhile, she is interested in Josh Duhamel, but she thinks he’s is under the spell, too. The problem is that her suitors are just plain creepy. Dax Shepard plays a narcissistic male model prone to taking his shirt off. John Heder is a street magician who has performance anxiety and appears in inappropriate places. Will Arnet is a painter with a bad Italian accent and an even worse wardrobe. And Danny Devito is the Sausage King who sees the world as a metaphor for sausage making. When Danny Devito has the most grounded realistic portrayal in the film, something is defiantly wrong. The four of them become a stalker pack and Kristen Bell ends up having to explain all her new found attention to her boss, Angelica Huston. Throw in Don Johnson and various other television character actors and you have a big rambling comedy with no focus.

In the film there is a scene that resembles a clown car bit and that is how I perceive this movie. You watch the car approach the center ring, you think, this is going to be good, and then the clowns jump out of the car, run around throwing up their hands and then they exit through the curtain. You’re left sitting there, shaking your head and wondering, was that it? This film is a mess. As I mentioned earlier, the premiss is interesting but the tone of the film was schizophrenic and the suitors had all the depth of a Saturday Night Live sketch. This film was desperately in need of a tighter script. Nice try, but even a cameo from Pedro of Napoleon Dynamite fame couldn’t get me to laugh at this one. This clown car had a flat.

Rating: Rent It All flash, no substance