All About Steve

I don’t know why anyone thought making All About Steve was a good idea, as the moment they read the script they should have realised it wasn't gonna work. It almost make you feel sorry for Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper. Bullock was having a career lull until The Proposal and The Blind Side sent her back to the top of the A-list, while before The Hangover was released Cooper wasn’t exactly a big name.

Now they’re both on top of the world and then up pops All About Steve, a movie made before their current career highs, which they probably both wish could have been quietly forgotten, as it puts a rather big stain on what has otherwise been a stellar 12 months for the pair.

All About Steve is all the fun of unhinged stalkers (a bizarrely popular comedy subject in Hollywood at the moment), with Sandra Bullock as crossword puzzler Mary Horowitz, who gets set up on a blind date with news cameraman, Steve (Cooper). She immediately decides he’s her ideal man and will do absolutely anything to be with him, obsessively following Steve around the country while he and reporter Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church) cover breaking news stories. Steve understandably gets increasingly exasperated by Mary’s obsessive behaviour (her entire existence is largely about being a laughing stock who even random strangers immediately hate), which isn’t helped by Hartman encouraging Mary as part of his campaign to make his cameraman’s life hell. However Steve comes to re-evaluate Mary when she becomes a news story herself.

All About Steve is an utterly unfathomable movie. From beginning to end it’s almost unbelievable anyone ever thought it would work. It skids from one unfunny situation to the next, while actually being more creepy and vaguely offence than entertaining. You get the feeling that the cast quickly realised the script was a dog and so they try to make up for it with huge amounts of unchecked over-acting. In fact Sandra Bullock’s Mary is taken to such unnerving oddball extremes that it starts to feel as if we’re being asked to laugh at someone who is literally mentally ill.

How are we meant to take this? Are we supposed to feel Mary’s manic pursuit of Steve is romantic? It’s not, it’s creepy, and the idea that at the end they need to come to some understanding is ridiculous. Mary isn’t a ditzy, oddball kook who’s misunderstood and just looks at the world differently to other people, she’s got massive problems and needs professional help – and a lot of it – not a sappy ending that seems to think it’s rather clever.

Worst of all is that All About Steve takes talents like Bullock, Cooper and Haden-Church, and makes them look so dreadful that you start to wonder why you ever thought they were actually quite good actors. I really do think Sandra needs to find a new way to choose films (she also produced All About Steve and so is more responsible for its existence than most), as while she sometimes hits paydirt, she doesn’t half make some dodgy choices.

The film really is a misfire on just about every front, going beyond simply not being funny and becoming rather unsettling and creepy.

Overall Verdict: A truly dismal movie that Cooper and Bullock should have lobbied the studio never to release, as all it can do is damage their currently strong reputations.

Reviewer: Phil Caine