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Welcome to the winter blahs. Also known as "When in Rome," a tepid romcom that is harmless but not very original or entertaining.
Even more than last week's "Extraordinary Measures," this Disney release seems like a made-for-TV movie. It stars Kristen Bell as Beth, a Guggenheim Museum curator who has yet to date a man she likes more than her job.
Her younger sister, on the other hand, announces she met a man on a flight to Italy two weeks earlier and is marrying him in Rome. At the sort of instant fairy-tale wedding that would challenge a reality-show team or Martha Stewart herself, Beth encounters the charming although accident-prone best man, Nick (Josh Duhamel).
She starts to fall for him, spots him kissing another woman and drowns her sorrows, in both champagne and in a nearby fountain. Beth is the anti-Cinderella as she suggests, "We wait our whole lives for some perfect guy to come in and sweep us off our feet. But, guess what? He's not coming."
- Starring: Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel.
- Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content.
- Web site: touchstone.movies.go.com/wheninrome/
When she plucks coins from the fountain, she unwittingly causes four strangers -- one goofier or creepier than the next -- to fall madly in love with her and pursue her to the ends of New York.
Soon, she's a magnet for a sausage magnate (Danny DeVito), street magician (Jon Heder), painter (Will Arnett) and aspiring male model (Dax Shepard), even as Nick tries to win her heart, too, and her job is suddenly on the line.
Maybe it's the Manhattan setting but Ms. Bell delivers her lines like a younger, more family-friendly version of Carrie Bradshaw, making "When in Rome" feel like a "Sex and the City" for tweens. Or, to be accurate, "Infatuation and the City."
Mr. Duhamel, meanwhile, tosses off his lines like early Tom Hanks but his role is all surface and no depth. Anjelica Huston brings a welcome haughty touch as Beth's demanding boss, which makes the workplace part of the movie better than the romance.
Mark Steven Johnson, who directed "Ghost Rider," "Daredevil" and "Simon Birch," does not push the limits of the PG-13 rating or the genre or much of anything else.
In fact, I thought the movie was PG until I checked the MPAA website.
Ms. Bell -- part of the "Couples Retreat" ensemble, the actress who dumped Jason Segel in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and TV's Veronica Mars -- tries to inject some life into a bland role that seems like a throwback to the early 1960s. But the roadblocks to romance are more like speed bumps on a most forgettable trip.
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