All About Steve

– Half of a star (out of four)
– Rated PG-13 for sexual content including innuendos.
– Who’s going to like it: nobody.

Even worse than The Ugly Truth

All About Steve stars two actors from two of this summer’s biggest movies – Sandra Bullock from The Proposal and Bradley Cooper from The Hangover. The trailers for it look funny and project the idea that it’s a cute romantic comedy. And that’s just what 20th Century Fox wants you to think. But don’t fall for it, for this movie has been around for a while, sitting on a dusty shelf – nobody has wanted to release it. Why? Because it’s downright awful.

All About Steve is basically all about nothing. Bullock plays Mary Horowitz a socially-awkward and neurotic newspaper crossword constructor. Her obsessive compulsive life is thrown in an opposing direction when she’s set up on a blind date with Steve (Cooper), a on-location cameraman shooting tragedies and disasters for a local news show. In an attempt to permanently get away from Mary’s craziness, Steve tells her that his work will keep them apart in their relationship and that he would take her on the road with him if he could.

Being her normal psychotic self, Mary’s obsession about Steve overcomes her. The next crossword puzzle she publishes, titled “All About Steve,” only features hints like, “Steve’s car smells like this,” and “Steve’s kiss is like this.” The puzzle frustrates so many of the paper’s readers that she’s fired from her job, giving her the free time she needs to fulfill Steve’s hollow invitation to be on the road with him.

And that’s only the first fifteen minutes of the movie. The other 84 minutes are filled with random characters, unbelievable situations and awful writing. It’s Mary following Steve like a puppy-dog stalker from one lame disaster to another – an anticlimactic cowboy standoff in Arizona, a domestic parenting case in Oklahoma, a tornado (that just-so-happens on a bright, sunny day) and a mine collapse trapping a dozen deaf children.

This movie is so dumb in nature and content that it’s offensive. The characters, their decision and the situations that they end up in are unmotivated and unbelievable. I challenge someone to defend All About Steve as being “entertaining.” Everything about it is one hundred percent absurd. But it’s not only offensive to audiences in that manner. The group of deaf children that fall down the mine shaft are constantly ripped on – not that I’m one against “politically incorrect” humor, but this one consistently cracks brutal jokes at the expense of deaf people. The constant barrage of deaf jokes makes you question whether the jokes were done to be funny or cruel.

Speaking of political incorrectness, while watching All About Steve, Bullock’s performance reminded me of Robert Downey Jr.’s lines in Tropical Thunder about Sean Penn’s performance as a “retard” in I Am Sam. He says that Penn didn’t win the Oscar because he went “full retard,” that nobody wants to see a fully retarded person on the big screen. I thought back to that scene while watching Bullock playing the Mary character. Over the duration of the film, Mary’s neurotic nature never lifts up – not once. Because of that, it becomes very uncomfortable to watch. You feel like a kid staring at your uncle’s four-fingered hand, unable to break eye contact with the missing digit. Not that there’s anything wrong with Uncle Rex for missing a thumb, but that there’s something wrong with you for being drawn to it. It’s not comfortable; therefore it’s not entertaining.

Several times throughout the movie I felt embarrassed for the actors involved – for the lines delivered, the characters they had to play and the things they had to do. I felt like it was degrading for them. And then I felt even more embarrassed when I realized that Sandra Bullock was a producer of the movie. After having such great comeback success with The Proposal, this trainwreck-of-a-movie will be a step backwards for her. How embarrassing.

All About Steve is too off, odd and unconventional for audiences. The movie’s moral is: “every crazy, neurotic and weird person fits in somewhere.” After seeing All About Steve, I can tell you where general audiences won’t fit in – and that’s in the theater showing this movie.

Photo credit: 20th Century Fox