In "All About Steve," the title character's first instinct upon meeting Sandra Bullock's Mary is to run away. Do yourself a favor and follow his example.
"All About Steve" utterly fails the most basic of comedic litmus tests. Over the course of 90 minutes it is completely incapable of eliciting laughs. The best an easily amused audience can hope for is an uncomfortable chuckle every 10 to 15 minutes -- and only if they are feeling particularly generous.
Sometimes quirky, incredibly smart characters completely incapable of keeping their mouths closed can be quite funny. In the case of Mary, however, all you want to do is tell her to shut up. A crossword constructor for a small town newspaper, Mary is a walking, talking encyclopedia, devoid of personality and common sense, spouting out every detail of everything to characters almost as disinterested as the audience.
Single-minded and ever optimistic, there is no depth to Mary's character, just a woman in ridiculous red boots who puts on makeup with a paint trowel and obsesses over Bradley Cooper's Steve, a man the audience feels almost as sympathetic for as they do for themselves for having to sit through the film. Steve is the first of many to sound the warning bell that Mary and her movie are to be kept where stalkers belong, at a safe restraining order's distance.
Mary's voice becomes a dull ache, which you long to remedy with Tylenol only to find she's in your head, too. Because her onscreen voice apparently wasn't enough torture, Sandra Bullock also narrates the film. The narration is perhaps the most pointless part of a pointless movie when the already crossword-obsessed Mary continues to exposit on the nature of life and love with a crossword puzzle as her metaphor for the universe and, well, everything.
After being euphemistically told by a flighty Steve that he would love to have her on the road with him, Mary takes his words to heart and sets out on a cross country trek to follow him and the news crew for which he is a cameraman. Along the way, many hijinx ensue, all of which are implausible, ridiculous and painful -- and none of which are funny.
The film is in fact one of the most unscrupulously and painfully unfunny movies in recent memory; it was tempting to walk out of the theater within the first 15 minutes. Listening to nails on a chalkboard for an hour and a half is probably funnier than enduring "All About Steve." The only emotion felt in that time, aside from an unspecified ache where laughter should have been, was a great wave of relief when the credits rolled and realized that the debacle of seeing "All About Steve" was over.
You can reach this writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
