When In Rome: From The Creative Minds That Gave You Old Dogs

 

 

I reveal to you a deep seeded obsession with watching bad movies. The types of movies that I know I will hate even before I begin watching them. The types of movies that are blatantly not made with an audience like me in mind. Yet I still watch them. Due to some masochistic impulse I am compelled to subject myself to the trauma of lowest-common-denominator, fast food cinema. Here I chronicle that obsession. I'm taking a bullet for you guys.

 

 

 

Two days after I watched this film I discovered that the writers of this vanilla opus also penned the brilliantly horrible Old Dogs. This information explained so much but it still didn't help me understand why this film exists.

 

When In Rome is a by-the-book example of a fast food film. This is a film that is so lazy and unoriginal that every single individual behind and in front of the camera can only say they did it for a paycheck as there is no other reason for this film existing that I can determine.

 

Kristen Bell stars as Beth, a classic Hollywood stereotype of the cute, career orientated woman who has no time for love. This is made very clear in the first 20 minutes as she is constantly running around Rome trying to get a signal for her cell phone (the term 'signal envy' in coined in the attempt to create a 21st century witticism although anyone heard using the term in reality should probably be ashamed of themselves). Eventually she gets drunk and jumps into a wishing fountain to yell at a statue. After she finishes her rant she begins to steal coins out of the fountain for reasons that are not entirely clear to me (I may have momentarily blacked out at this point, it is hard to tell).

 

As she grabs each coin we cut to the man who threw each one into the fountain. Apparently they wished for love and because Beth took the coins out of the fountain these men immediately fall head over heels in love with her. Due to pointless plot related conveniences, we don't see the owner of the final coin she picks up, a poker chip.

 

The rest of the film is this: 4 weird men chase her around New York trying to woo her while the real love interest in the film, Josh Duhamel as Nick, begins a relationship with her. But who is the owner of the mysterious fifth coin?? Could it be Nick? He does seem to fall madly in love with Beth for no particular reason, and Beth is a bit of a tool who constantly runs hot and cold so why does Nick even care? Are you getting what I'm trying to say?

 

When In Rome is jam packed with great talent who are given absolutely no material to work with. Will Arnett plays an Italian stereotype in a way that loses all the goodwill he generated from his brilliant work in Arrested Development. Jon Heder is mindbogglingly embarrassing as an eccentric magician (Napoleon Dynamite as Criss Angel). Danny DeVito is Danny DeVito. Don Johnson appears in two scenes as does Angelica Huston, both playing pointless, plot propelling cliches. Someone needed a pay-check it seems and Shaq appears late in the film literally looking like he stumbled across the set while shooting and they offered him a cameo for a hundred bucks.

 

Every movement of When In Rome is so by the numbers that it often feels like the script was spat out of an automatic screenplay computer program. Men are men in this film. They have poker nights and tease each other when one appears to be 'sensitive'. The male love interest even has an emotionally revealing monologue where he opens up about his past thus letting the girl see his sensitive side and finally fall completely in love with him. What's the monologue about? What is this man's biggest emotional crux? Apparently he was a high school football star who was forced into early retirement due to an injury and ever since then he felt like he had disappointed his father by not going further with his football career. This is literally the film's dramatic high point. Really...

 

I'm just gonna dot point the rest of the cliches:

 

 

It all ends happily of course. The man runs across town to catch the girl and then the girl makes the climactic declaration of “I love you, even more than my job”. Yep, she actually says that. I love that it's 2010 and Hollywood still can't give us a professional woman who can balance a love life and a job. Apparently women can only have one or the other even though it's never a problem for men. Oh and the woman messes up her make or break job issue, only to be saved by the efforts of our man. It seems she can't even do her job properly without a man helping. Yet this is a film targeted to women.

 

When In Rome is not nearly as horrific as Old Dogs but in many ways it is much, much worse. It has no reason to exist other than to fulfil the quota of romantic comedies that Hollywood needs to produce because a portion of the audience still demand this crud. This film is a bad compendium of elements you have seen a hundred times before.

 

At least it didn't make me physically ill...