Kristen Bell plays Beth who is a workaholic and afraid of love. None of this evident by the viewer, but luckily all the characters tell her this over and over again so that’s helpful. She goes to Rome for her sister’s wedding. She only met him two weeks ago but they planned a well-developed wedding. This is obviously foreshadowing the magic to come. Beth meets Some Guy who is klutzy and charming.
But plot twist! Some Guy kissed someone else and Beth saw it out of context! Deciding not to interpret it as an obvious drunken stumble, Beth decides to denounce love and take five coins out of the Fontana D’Amore in order to save them from pain. As any sane person would do. Blah, blah, blah. Those five guys are now under a spell and are magically in love with her one of which is Some Guy. Of course.
This movie is very dull because everything that you think will happen happens. So I spent the movie amusing myself in my own way. The first was a mental game show called Guess What Awesome B-List Actor Will Appear Next? All hail the casting director because they gave us Wonderfalls’s Lee Pace, The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal, Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan, Arrested Development’s Will Arnett, “Garfunkle and Oates”’s Kate Micucci, the wonderful Anjelica Huston, and the effective creeper Danny DeVito.
It also had the naked chick from Broken Flowers and Clarie’s ex-boyfriend from LOST. However due to their roles on Entourage and Paul Blart: Mall Cop puts their awesome status on probation.
Since this whole plot is incredibly predictable, it also became fun to imagine it detracting from the norm. For example, during the early party scene with Bell and Pace, I grew weary of the dull back-story of them being exes so I combined their amazing but thematically different TV shows: Veronica Mars and Pushing Daisies. The DJ gets murdered for too many clichéd record scratches in one scene. Bell, as Veronica, lies and says she is a stupid curator named Beth and gains access to the internal files of the museum to look up who hired the DJ. All with a cold and sultry voice over, of course.
Pace will be Ned who neurotically makes his way to the corpse and temporarily revive the DJ to question him. After about 42 minutes of word play subplots they discover that is was Austin, the cynical critic! He almost got away with it too…
I should give the movie credit. There was one scene that went against the norm, but it was so bonkers. For their first real date, Some Guy and Beth go to a restaurant in New York City. Not just any restaurant! This is one that has absolutely no lights in the place and all of the waiters wear night vision goggles. So Beth and Some Guy are bumping into everything and everyone and their waiter (The hilarious Schaal) just keeps mocking them and eavesdropping on them.
None of this should work, because it’s incredibly stupid but I was heavily amused. All of the jokes in this scene were really easy and illogical, but…I have no excuse. The rest of the movie was like that for the rest of my audience. The movie is never aggravating, but boy is it stupid.