20th Century Fox | 2009 | Rated PG-13 | 98 minutes

Want to know how to craft a hit comedy in just three easy steps? Step One: Assemble an incredibly talented cast that includes bankable talent such as Sandra Bullock and two cast members from the wildly successful comedy THE HANGOVER, Bradley Cooper and Ken Jeong. Step Two: Start with a quirky premise. In this case a cruciverbalist, who though in her late thirties, still lives at home with her mom and dad but is always upbeat, peppy and marching to the beat of her own drummer. After her parents set her up on a blind date, she grasps at anything to live what others may consider a “normal” life and thus begins her campaign of stalking her blind date around the country. Step Three: Assemble all of the elements together in a cohesive script that seamlessly blends together the humorous and the more personal moments to reveal a little something about the characters as they progress through their journey. Of course one may feel it necessary to forego step three all together and just mix up bits from steps one and two and see what happens. That would be the case with ALL ABOUT STEVE.

Although initially the quirkiness of the premise does seem to be something that could work comedically, with ALL ABOUT STEVE this is not the case as screenwriter Kim Barker (LICENSE TO WED) instead turns out a painfully predictable script that is riddled with implausibilities, coincidences and scenes that are forced and contrived and far from based in any form of reality. While these reasons in themselves are enough to derail a good story idea, Barker also misunderstands the need for a character to change and grow throughout the screenplay by choosing to make the same character three completely different people in each of the screenplay’s acts, without any real inciting moments or justifications behind the dramatic changes.

For instance, in the film’s first act, Sandra Bullock’s character Mary Horowitz is an incredibly intelligent woman who absolutely adores her job constructing crossword puzzles for the local newspaper. She is single and she is apparently exceedingly happy. She loves spouting random trivia facts to anyone who will listen and derives an incredible amount of joy from seeing people trying to do her crosswords each week. When meeting with the editor of her paper though about wanting to expand their crosswords from running weekly to running daily and to be more in alignment with an increasing level of difficulty as in “The New York Times,” her boss does not applaud her business acumen or her drive, but instead simply looks at her and asks her if she ever goes out on dates. Later when Mary is talking to a group of students at a elementary school career day, and trying to inspire them to follow their dreams, a boy raises his hand and asks her if she even has a boyfriend. It seems that everyone else is more concerned with Mary having a boyfriend than Mary is, and Mary is fine with that, choosing to be happy in the world in which she lives.

Barker though uses these two occurrences to become the catalysts that set Mary into the crazy stalking behavior that drives the entire second act of the film. Instead of allowing a quirky and intelligent woman to be developed on screen and to show her awkwardness in beginning to date, Mary is relegated to nothing more than a banal representation of the promising character that was introduced in the first act. Barker demeans her character and seems to want the audience to believe that the only way for Mary to be able to define who she is as an individual is through having a boyfriend. Mary’s quirkiness now swings wildly from a mixture of charming, though a bit annoying, to an unadulterated blown-out of proportion caricature of who she was in the first act. She cluelessly follows Bradley Cooper’s character Steve around the country, oblivious to any reality present in the situations she finds herself in. She becomes something for Thomas Haden Church’s character, Hartman, to manipulate, not out of spite, but just for a laugh. All of a sudden the intelligent woman is replaced with the love lorn puppy dog who trots alongside the van that Steve and Hartman drive away in, trying to lap a drink from the cup that Hartman holds out the window offering her.

Despite outlandish scenes in the script including protests over a three-legged baby and a group of deaf children falling down a mineshaft, and implausibilities such as characters plummeting down the same mineshaft without so much as an injury and AMC Gremlins being able to drive cross country after being decimated by a tornado, the fact is, the biggest let down in the movie is the decision to transform an intelligently unique woman into a shameful stereotype. This is where the film completely loses its audience, because why should the audience sympathize with someone who is willing to give up every semblance of an individualistic persona after a less than ten minute blind date? Yes, characters need to change throughout a screenplay to make them interesting, but doing so at the sake of their dignity is in the end, really not that funny.

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