Review: When In Rome

It's true that I am a fan of Kristen Bell, I was one of the few who stuck with her junior detective series Veronica Mars and also enjoyed her performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. However my opinon of her has vastly changed after watching the dire When in Rome. Bell plays a workaholic gallery manager, we know she's a workaholic because she puts her career before her relationships (shock horror!!), who goes to Italy for her younger sister's wedding and falls for the Best Man. However after seeing him with another woman she goes to the 'fountain of love' and picks out four random coins and a poker chip. After returning to New York she is pursued by four oddballs who turn out to be the men whose coins she picked out of the fountain. There's Jon 'Napoleon Dynamite' Heder as a weird street magician, Arrested Developmen'ts Will Arnett as a flamboyant artist, Bell's real-life love Dax Shephard as a vain male model and Danny DeVito as the owner of a sausage company. None of these men are given particularly interesting back-stories and are basically one note gags so when they keep turning up you get sick of them after a while. It turns out the reason they are following her is that all the men wished for love when they threw their coins in the fountain and they are now all in love with her. So when the best man shows up again Bell is happy but then she finds out it was his poker chip so the question is he really falling for her or is it just the spell?

The question really is why would anyone watch this? This is supposedly a rom-com but most of the rom is presented as mild stalking or slight witchcraft. While the com is also non-existent despite the comic talent involved only two scenes really made me laugh one involves a date in one of those restaurants-in-the-dark with Flight of the Conchords' Kristen Schaal as the over intrusive waitress and Danny DeVito's line where he tells Bell that encased meat is his life's work. It was also nice to see Heder reunited with the guy who played Pedro in Napoelon Dynamite, here as his magician's assistant. But overall this is just generic overload with a male lead who just does nothing (Josh Dumael) and a female lead who should know better. Why any of the supporting male stars or Angelica Huston (as Bell's boss) would want to get involved is beyond me. Unless you want a night in mocking a really bad film, avoid this.