Directed by Mark Steven Johnson
Written by David Diamond & David Weissman
This was rough. My first reaction was “what is Angelica Houston doing in this?” She is above this, way above this. She is a fantastic actress and yet she does this? She is not bad, though she doesn’t have much to do. All the other players are pretty awful, but I blame that more on the writing and directing. I wouldn’t call it a mess, but it was extremely unpolished. There are films that you can tell the filmmakers took the time to make sure they have a quality product, whether it turns out good or not, and then there are those that seem like they just threw it together to get it out and make some money already. This is an example of the latter. I had low expectations going in and they weren’t even met. This is definitely a January dump film. Just something that the studio had as filler in the times after awards rush and before anything good ever really comes out. It did have one or two funny parts though.
The story is pretty corny: a woman who loves her job more than the possibility of love goes to her sister’s wedding, meets a handsome guy who she starts to fall for, but because she takes coins from the fountain of love, she is led to believe all the men that start following her, proclaiming their love for her, are only doing so because of a curse. Pretty lame story if you ask me, but where it really fails is in the execution. There was some bad editing. Too often things went on for too long or were even completely unnecessary and irrelevant inserts that were basically just filler to make it long enough. The highlights include the blackout dining date, which was very funny until it was ruined by the story of the film, Bobby Moynihan, who was funny in a very small role, and Kristen Bell. Her acting was not top notch, but she was gorgeous as always. Pretty much everything else was either meh or worse.
Nick (Josh Duhamel) is quite typical and cliche, and the host of other guys following Beth (Bell) are too caricatured too actually be funny, or add much to the proceedings. These guys include Dax Shepard, Danny DeVito, Jon Heder, and Will Arnett. What surprised me about this project was the star power. Somehow they managed to get decent names signed on for a project like this. Houston, DeVito, even a cameos by Efren Ramirez, Shaq, and Lawrence Taylor, each of whom have no business being here. Ugh, I’m just so annoyed by what just happened. I would have to say a definite pass on this one. I thoroughly regret agreeing to go see this.
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