487. When In Rome (2010)

Starring: Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Anjelica Huston

Director: Mark Steven Johnson

Running Time: 91 mins

When In Rome is an American film about a hard-working New York woman, typically unlucky when it comes to finding love, who finds herself being relentlessly pursued by a group of admirers after she picks some coins out of a magic fountain when in Rome.

Right, this is going to be a little bit more of an attack on the rom-com genre than the actual film, but I’ll try to stay as specific as possible. In this film, you’ve got a completely generic, predictable story, with next to no entertaining comedy, and extremely irritating dialogue and characters that make this often painful to watch.

I have had enough with these stupid rom-coms. If you like chick flicks, such as 27 Dresses, this film’s going to be great fun for you, but if you don’t, it’ll be another hour and a half of sheer pain, boredom and sickness.

Just to emphasise how ridiculously generic this film is, I honestly believe that if you were to watch 27 Dresses, cross out Katherine Heigl’s face and draw in Kristen Bell’s, you’d have When In Rome, because the themes are largely similar (excluding the stupid magic part), and the whole atmosphere is identical.

Returning to this film, what is most annoying, despite it being so clichéd and irritatingly identical to other rom-coms, is the fact that you’ve got a completely preposterous and annoyingly cheesy magical element to the story.

In other versions of this film, at least the story is within a realistic setting, so you can give it a little bit of respect, but the fact that this takes on a magical Cinderella story makes it a whole lot more difficult to try to relate to and therefore enjoy, because you’re constantly criticising its idiotic concept.

What you would think is that a film like this can save itself by having some good and simple comedy, and although you can say that the comedy here is certainly simple, it’s definitely not any good. It has its moments, and I laughed about twice (in one scene about halfway through), but the majority of it is predictable and unintelligent joking that is just not entertaining enough.

Overall, I’ll give this a 4.3, because although it had some simple comedy, as well as one funny scene, it’s an irritating, generic and formulaic romantic comedy that’s only really bearable to watch if you are a big fan of this genre.