Directed by Phil Traill, All About Steve is a “romantic comedy” starring Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper. Bullock plays Mary, a stuck up and socially awkward crossword puzzle constructor, who instantly becomes smitten with Steve (Cooper) and immediately jumps him at a blind date. Being a cameraman for a news team, he assumes that he won’t see her again and tells her that he will be out of town and that she should join him, just to get rid of her after a disastrous first date. To his utter dismay, he soon realizes that she is stalking him all over the country.

This movie is exactly what I was referring to when I ranted about the quality of rom-coms going downhill. From the first minute on, the movie accumulates all the ingredients of a recipe for disaster. Meet Mary, she is a completely dysfunctional woman: she is stuck up, still lives with her parents and is socially awkward. No, no… she is not shy and soft-spoken, actually quite the opposite: she simply can’t shut the hell up. In essence, she is your usual rom-com heroine, attractive, intelligent but completely clueless without a man by her side. There is absolutely nothing about the characters or the plot that feels authentic or realistic. The characters are shallow and one-dimensional. Mary is an unlikable obsessive nerd who becomes smitten with Steve at first sight (what a surprise). Steve and Hartman basically treat her like shit and yet, she takes it all in stride because she can’t take a hint or twenty. The film is basically a collection of vignettes as she follows the news team on different news stories. She doesn’t really make any decision, she only  sticks around because of her annoyingly obsessive and clueless character. That’s not what I call driving a plot.

The acting is nothing to complain about even though the film is atrocious. One still has to commend Sandra Bullock for submitting herself to this kind of humiliation, doing her best to carry this horrible flick. The biggest problem is that she is either seeking to make those horrible movies or she has no idea how to choose her work.  This may well be Bullock’s lowest point of her career and you have to ask yourself how she could win an Oscar in the same year. Bradley Cooper is… Bradley Cooper, he is a decent supporting actor but he hasn’t shown me anything that tells me he will last as a leading man. In the movie, well he doesn’t get to do anything at all but play a hunky dude. Thomas Haden Church manages to extract a few chuckles as the egotistical TV reporter.

Most of the blame should go to the superficial and completely unrealistic screenplay written by Kim Barker. You will see a tornado drop out of nowhere, a group of deaf children falling into a mine shaft after the ground they were running in suddenly opens beneath their feet (ahahah I’m laughing!!!), and a sub-plot about a three-legged baby (so funny right?) The characters are stereotyped simpletons that are nearly impossible to relate to and the story is as implausible as it gets. Simply put, there is nothing romantic about this film and the comedy is either unbearable or almost nonexistent.

A dreadful, absolutely horrendous “romantic comedy” that never feels authentic, and is only remotely funny. Just another unintelligent romantic comedy that have become trademark of the genre. Not an F because of a few laughs toward the end, I might have been delirious by then, I don’t remember.

D-

Notes: Rated PG-13 for sexual content including innuendos. 99 minutes.