When In Rome is a fantasy with a premise that’s straight out of the 1950s, and that ain’t so bad.  A little bit of magic, a little romance, a bolt of lightning, and bang, you got your movie, right?  Well, you have a movie, but that lightning?  Let’s just say it’s still not in the proverbial bottle.

Kristen Bell plays workaholic Beth, a curator at the prestigious Guggenheim Museum in New York, whose job seems to consist mostly of throwing big parties for donors, rather than actually studying and acquiring art.  Beth’s younger sister falls for a charming Italian, and so Beth’s off to Rome for the wedding.  After feeling spurned by the Best Man, hunky Nick (Josh Duhamel), she plucks some coins from the Fontana de Amore, magically causing four random men in the city to instantly fall in love with the woman who removed their coins — Beth.  Which leads me to wonder about the guy that cleans the fountain each week.  But never mind.

Beth returns to New York, and her four suitors pursue her in the Big Apple for most of the film, with dreadfully boring results.  Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) is a street magician more annoying than David Blaine, Will Arnett plays an aspiring artist, Dax Shepard is a ridiculously narcissistic male model, and Danny DeVito is a sausage purveyor.  No sausage jokes, please.  The zeal with which these men pursue Beth clearly moves beyond admiration into the realm of stalking, and to think that Beth wouldn’t immediately dial 911 after finding two strangers in her apartment stretches credulity.

While all this is going on, Nick is still pursuing the fetching Beth, too, but she thinks he’s also under the fountain’s spell like her other crazy suitors, so she dismisses his affection as false.  All of this could have been cleared up with one line: “Is this your poker chip?”

Josh Duhamel and Kristen Bell seem like nice enough actors.  I liked Duhamel in the guilty-pleasure TV series Las Vegas, and Bell was the star of the fervently admired TV show Veronica Mars.  But here, they’re placed in one tired and unfunny situation after another.  The big laugh is supposed to come when they go on a date at one of those sensory deprivation dinners in the dark, but there’s no real payoff to the scene.

For a movie called When In Rome, a surprisingly scant amount of the story takes place in the Eternal City.  I timed about 20 minutes of the film’s 91 minute running time.  False advertising?  Eh, maybe.  But the truly dubious claims are on the DVD package.  “Flat-out hilarious,” says one quote.  “Entertaining and full of laughs,” claims another.  Alas, it is neither.  The DVD of When In Rome also notes that the film is “From the studio that brought you The Proposal.”  That may have meant something back in MGM’s heyday, when they were cranking out classic musicals left and right.  But today, studios rarely have such true brand identity.  After all, Touchstone may have released the two aforementioned romantic comedies, but it is also the studio that brought you Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.  Which did not star Sandra Bullock or Kristen Bell. 

WHEN IN ROME on DVD

The DVD of When In Rome includes three deleted scenes, two astonishingly bad music videos, and a set of bloopers I found funnier than the movie itself.  Which leads me to Roger Ebert’s oft-quoted standard of his old colleague Gene Siskel’s: Would I have enjoyed a documentary about these same actors having lunch better than the movie?

6/19/2010

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