Review of When in Rome (2002) by Michael T — 08 Feb 2012

'When In Rome' may be far from the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, but that doesn't change the fact that it is painfully stupid and contrived.

The premise focuses on Beth, a workaholic from New York who is cynical about love and relationships, and instead wants to focus on her career. She is immediately shocked when her sister announces that she is engaged to an Italian stallion and will be married in Rome. Beth unenthusiastically goes to the wedding and is smitten by Nick, a friend of the groom. When she feels that she doesn't have a chance with him, she angrily takes a few coins from the famous Roman love fountain, however, what she doesn't know is that the men who threw in those coins are under a spell from the fountain's magic: they're all in love with her.

First of all, I should say that the movie tried. The actors in the movie obviously put a lot of effort in, especially Kristen Bell, but not even good actors can save a movie that's damaged by horrible writing, forced humour, bad dialogue and stereotypical characters. Every character was some sort of stereotype. Kristen Bell's character was the typical successful heroine who is also cold, Josh Duhamel's character is the boring love interest and as for the Italian stereotypes, the less said about them the better. I think the worst characters (with the exception of Jon Heder as the magician) were the men who threw coins in the fountain. They were literally stalking Beth and half of the acts they pulled could get them arrested. And then in the end the film tries to pass them off as sympathetic characters. It's just painful!

The characters were awful but as mentioned earlier, what really dragged the movie down was bad writing and dialogue. The film was filled with countless plot-holes and inconsistencies, so many that if I were to list all of them, I'd be here all day! This does nothing but subtract from the realism of the film and I know what you're thinking: 'People don't watch romantic comedies for realism.' That may be true because people watch these kinds of movies for escapism, but truthfully, the best romantic comedies are the ones that people can relate to, the realistic ones. 'Bridesmaids,' 'Bridget Jones' and 'When Harry Met Sally' are some examples because they deal with pain, but most of all, the characters are relatable and so are the situations. In 'When In Rome', some of the situations are so ridiculous that no one can relate to them. It's especially horrible because the writers were trying so hard to make the physical humour genuinely funny, but it all fell apart.

With that said, there were some moments that were genuinely funny and one moment in particular where we actually learned something about Beth. That moment was pretty decent, but the problem was that it was immediately thwarted by the faults I listed above. As I said, it's not the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen. I've seen some horrible, horrible films, but this one at least had forgivable moments because I can tell they tried.