When in Rome a Rom-Com Abomination
As much as it pains me to say this – and it does pain me a whole heck of a lot considering just how much I adore “Veronica Mars” and the singular talents of one Kristin Bell – but I do not think I ever seen a worse film is my time as a professional critic than When in Rome. Worse than John McTiernan’s remake of Rollerball, worse than Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, even worse than Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, this new romantic comedy from Daredevil and Ghost Rider director Mark Steven Johnson isn’t so much the bottom of the barrel as it is that disgustingly grotesque and smelly brownish stuff underneath it, and if Dante is right and there are indeed seven layers to Hell then this is the movie showing on a continuous loop in one of them.
Josh Duhamel and Kristin Bell have nothing to laugh about in Touchstone Pictures' When in Rome
The last film I felt this much vitriol towards was the 2006 Christmas comedy Deck the Halls. Nothing has made me squirm in such outright and visible pain since, and while I pride myself in never having left a theater early sitting there watching this one took my endurance levels all the way to their breaking point. This movie is a waste of talent, effort and most of all time, and why anyone with half a brain would willingly choose to subject themselves to viewing it is light years beyond me.
I have so many issues I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s just say that David Diamond and David Weissman haven’t so much penned a script as they have scribbled down a bunch of barely connected notes after scouring the book of romantic comedy clichés for ideas. The pair’s last screenplay was for Old Dogs (which I admit to having missed) and considering the reviews they got for that one I figured the only direction they could possibly go was up. But that assessment was wrong, dead wrong, and not only does When in Rome not make a lick of sense or have any sort of comedic continuity I’m not sure it’s actually meant to.
I’m not going to talk about the plot or the characters or the sequences of events going on inside the picture. I’m not going to dissect Bell’s performance other than to say this spunky and gifted actress deserves better then the throwaway drivel Hollywood producers keep throwing her direction. I’m not going to comment on the fact Angelica Huston, Danny DeVito, Don Johnson and Will Arnett all make appearances that collectively add up to not a single solitary laugh. I’m not going to go into a lot of things that I could have (like why there’s an out of left field Napoleon Dynamite reunion or wonder aloud why Dax Shepard keeps getting work), the simple truth being that even thinking about the film again in order to write this review is making me uncomfortably ill.
What I am going to say is that When in Rome isn’t so much a travesty as it is an abomination. It is a movie I hope I never have to sit through or think about again, and I pity those heading off to the multiplex to see it because the 90-minutes of pain they’re in for defies all forms of description.
Film Rating: no stars (out of 4)
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