Another January, another batch of mediocre romantic comedies. Last year we got Bride Wars and New In Town. this year we get Leap Year and When In Rome. Director Mark Steven Johnson, who was behind Daredevil and Ghost Rider, employs a small inkling of promise in this otherwise studio-heavy, generic slapstick romantic comedy.
Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) stars as Beth, an independent, career-driven New York City girl who finds love silly. When her sister announces a surprise wedding in Italy, she just barely fits it into her schedule to make it there. At the wedding she decides to take a chance on love as she encounters Nick, played by Josh Duhamel (Transformers). Their meet-cute is one of the funnier scenes, on the pretense that every single element in this film feels manufactured to its core. Things don’t go quite so well and, in a drunken stupor, Beth heads outside to a fountain and scrapes up coins from the bottom of the pool. These coins were dropped by a number of men, and through pure magic their love is all now centered on Beth.
The rest of the film is devoted to the antics that each of the men do in order to win her love. Duhamel oddly comes in and out of the story, like some side character throughout the middle of the film. Danny Devito, Dax Shepard, Jon Heder and Will Arnett each take their turn at earning Beth’s hand. Some of it works, most is tone deaf. It might have been that I saw Devito’s naked ass in the It’s Always Sunny Christmas special the night before watching this, but he didn’t fit in the film. He is playing it light here and all of his scenes with Bell are awkward, and not in the typical Devito way.
Shepard plays a vain model, and it works as well as it could. Arnett tries his hardest, but Rome is further proof that he’ll most likely never live up to Arrested Development‘s GOB. Heder is just painful, his only laugh coming through a reunion with a certain Napoleon Dynamite character.
The worst moments of the film are the Old Dogs-style gags courtesy of screenwriter David Diamond, who’s responsible for both subpar studio comedies. The jokes range from a comic(?) motif which consists of Duhamel hitting his head on things to Heder falling on things. People get hurt in this movie, and it’s not as funny as it should be. The peak of these terrible gags occurs when Duhamel and Bell go out to dinner. Unfortunately, the restaurant has no lights and food must be eaten without sight for a more intimate experience. Imagine the hijinks that ensue when Bell’s lovers show up and everyone starts tripping over each other with food going everywhere. Hilarious.
Thankfully, Johnson moves along at a swift pace: there is never a tediously extended scene that takes forever to end. The jokes are constant, though they fall flat most of the time. Duhamel also does well as the dashing leading man. He has decent comedic timing and the looks to carry the role.
When In Rome can’t do much to get away from its tired Hollywood cliches, but then it never really tries to. There are laughs, but they are so far and few in between that a trip to the theaters is far from justified. With all the money that can be saved from avoiding these trite romantic comedies, you may have enough for your own trip to Rome.
3 out of 10