Movie Review: All About Steve
Comedy gets lost in 'Steve’s' confusion
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A good idea lurks in the latest Sandra Bullock comedy. Some of that idea reaches the screen, but it soon gets irretrievably lost.
The severely uneven All About Steve contains a potentially fascinating character: Mary Magdalene Horowitz. The product of a Jewish-Catholic marriage, Mary’s heritage inflicts the stereotypical psychological handicaps associated with Jews and Catholics upon her.
Motor-mouthed Mary is an endless source of information. It’s difficult to tell if she’s a savant or an idiot savant. She also unloads personal information upon strangers minus any awareness that they probably have no interest in her.
Even though the 40-something Mary lives with her parents, she has a job that she’s brilliant at: crossword constructor for The Sacramento Herald.
A blind date with Steve, a cameraman for a cable-news network, results in love at first sight — from Mary’s perspective, not Steve’s. High-velocity Mary is far too intense for Steve. That’s something All About Steve does well. Swept away by infatuation, Mary, like other people suffering from a crush, magnifies the slightest things about the man she’s just met into indisputable signs.
Bradley Cooper (The Hangover and He’s Just Not That Into You), co-stars as the spooked object of Mary’s obsession. Cooper doesn’t have much to work with, but Thomas Haden Church, as the stereotypically vain newsman Steve photographs, gets more opportunity.
After a modestly promising start, All About Steve hits the road with Steve and Hartman as they drive into the heartland to cover breaking stories. Mary follows. The film’s half-baked moral about accepting the differences of others and more silly than satirical jabs at broadcast news aren’t worth the trip.
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