Tags : all about steve, all about steve review, sandra bullock
Movie Review: All About Steve ( * )
It’s stinkeroo time.
That All About Steve is all about a stalker is not the movie’s problem. After all, that’s just one character. The problem is that the movie itself has the personality of a stalker.
From the moment it begins, we just want it to go away and leave us alone.
All About Steve isn’t really all about Steve. Or even all about Mary, who’s actually the pivotal character. It’s all about what happens when a movie is all about severe miscalculation.
Boy, is this one not funny. Boy, is it not charming. Boy, is it not.
All About Steve is — or, at least, wants to be — a screwball comedy. But even the screwiest of screwball comedies has to be anchored to some degree, however slight, in the real world. What world this one is anchored in is a mystery for the ages. Find me a moment or an exchange you buy, I dare you.
The premise: Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl wants boy, girl grabs guy, guy runs for the hills, girl follows boy. Everywhere. Boy thinks girl is a nut job. We think he’s severely understating the case.
Sandra Bullock (who also produced) stars as Mary Magdalene Horowitz, a Jewish-Catholic crossword puzzle constructor for the Sacramento Herald who goes on a brief blind date with the title character, a cable-TV news cameraman played by Bradley Cooper, and immediately (that is, improbably immediately, unconvincingly immediately, idiotically immediately, laughably immediately) falls for him, convinced that he is indeed her soulmate.
He’s not interested, to say the least, but she, severely infatuated, starts stalking him and his reporter partner, played by Thomas Haden Church, as they travel around the country covering breaking news. She’s intent on convincing Steve that they belong together, so she turns up at every media event that they cover.
Then the lovesick eccentric inadvertently becomes part of the breaking news that’s gripping the nation and sinks the film even further below the surface of respectability.
What Phil Traill, a TV director on his first feature film, thought was of value in the screenplay by Kim Barker — who also wrote the strained Robin Williams comedy, License to Wed — or why he encouraged or accepted overacting throughout his cast are anyone’s guesses. Romantic obsessiveness couldn’t be any less interesting than it is here.
The result is a movie so overwrought, strident, manic, awkwardly mannered, and off-putting, it makes your teeth hurt.
As fine as Bullock was in her delightful recent hit, The Proposal, she’s an embarrassment here, as she takes a peculiar approach to an already peculiar character who simply cries out for institutionalization. Her performance is chalk-on-the-blackboard intolerable from first scene to last.
Cooper, who actually shot this film before The Hangover, gets kind of lost along the way, perhaps on purpose. And Church tries to strap the movie on his back and carry it over the finish line by displaying a ham quotient that’s off the charts.
The ultimate culprits, however, would appear to be director Traill and producer Bullock, whose artistic licenses should be at least temporarily revoked. At the end, they try to attach a point to All About Steve by paying lip service to our need to celebrate diversity, but it’s too little, too late, and too insincere by half.
This puzzling comedy about a woman who constructs puzzles is itself an unsolvable puzzle.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
94 minutes
In theaters September 4, 2009
Rating: PG-13, Comedy
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