When In Rome is a romantic comedy directed by Mark Steven Johnson (Ghost Rider, Daredevil) and written by the awesomely named David Diamond and David Weissman (Old Dogs).  It’s the story of a young museum curator named Beth (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) who wants to fall in love but puts her job first.  We know this because we are told it.  She is forced to fly to Rome to attend her sister’s (Alexis Dziena, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) last minute wedding to a guy she met 2 weeks ago.  While there she meets best man Nick (Josh Duhamel, Las Vegas, Transformers) and instantly there are sparks between the two.  However due to a misunderstanding she thinks he’s taken and winds up in a magical fountain that according to legend (which she does not know) if you take coins out of, the person who’s coin you pick will fall in love with you.  She winds up picking out 5 coins.

Upon her return to New York she suddenly finds herself being pursued by a group of eccentric characters made up of a model (Dax Shepard), a painter (Will Arnett), a street magician (Jon Heder), and a sausage maker (Danny Devito), along with Nick who’s trying to figure out what went wrong that night at the wedding.  She must now figure out a way to get these guys to stop interrupting her life so she can launch a new exhibit.

I am not a big rom-com person.  I like my romance dosed with some drama, but occasionally there will be a good one of these to come along.  Unfortunately this isn’t one of those good ones.  I know I made the plot sound pretty complicated in the summary, but it’s actually pretty simplistic.  So simplistic in fact that there is no real struggle here.  There’s no real challenge for the protagonist to overcome.  Beth and Nick fall for each other pretty much immediately and then there’s just these other really poorly written one dimensional characters that are mildly annoying in the background (although they’re majorly annoying to the audience).

Kristen Bell is pretty.

One big giant slap in the face that this movie made over typical romantic comedies is that the cast was made up mostly of great actors (if you take out Duhamel and Heder).  I primarily watched this because of my supreme love of Kristen Bell and not only her looks but her talent.  Unfortunately this script was too horrible for her to do anything to save it.  At least she did look pretty still.  But besides Bell you have the likes of Will Arnett, Danny Devito, and to a much lesser extent Dax Shepard.  All 3 are really funny actors who are confined to horrible caricatures of characters that they just cannot get out of.  There’s also Alexis Dziena, who is also a wonderful actress.  Unfortunately she has a very small role as Beth’s sister, but it was actually nice to see her playing against type as either a sexpot or a bitch. Also in too small of a role is the great and funny Kate Micucci of Garfunkel & Oates, among other things, who plays a co-worker/assistant (it wasn’t quite clear) of Beth’s.

I have absolutely no idea how Mark Steven Johnson with a track record of bad comic book movies got this gig, but he clearly shouldn’t have.  The direction was almost non-existant it seemed or counter intuitive.  For one thing was it necessary to re-pair Jon Heder with Efren Ramirez (Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite)?  He’s literally playing Pedro in a scene out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the story in any way.  This could only have been a directorial decision.  And it makes no sense.  Also can we stop letting David Diamond and David Weissman write movies?  Please.

There is honestly no good reason to see this unless you are a Kristen Bell completist.  However if you are willing to endure it comes out on DVD and Blu-ray June 15th and is available through the links below:

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