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All About Steve (2009)

Director: Phil Traill

Time Out rating

Average user rating

5 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

The idea that larger-than-life characters provoke equally large laughs is proved awfully wrong by ‘All About Steve’, a film that topped many US critics’ polls as the worst film of 2009. In a performance set to join the ranks of cinema’s most misguided career choices, Sandra Bullock plays Mary, an excitable crossword planner who develops an unhealthy fixation on Bradley Cooper’s titular news cameraman and decides to stalk him across the country, from disaster to disaster, in an attempt to win his heart.

Thomas Haden Church leads a solid supporting cast as puffed-up newsman Hartman Hughes, who is the focus of the script’s unsubtle but often on-target swipes at the mainstream news media. But he’s no match for Bullock’s berserker central turn. Mary is a memorable comic creation for all the wrong reasons: glibly written, offensively characterised and bizarrely dressed, she’s the classic screwball ditz taken to grotesque and at times unwatchable extremes.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 2056: 14-20 January, 2010

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User reviews of this film

LisaD said...

Posted on Apr 21 2010 16:40 Offensively unfunny, with its one star earned by a few good lines and a decent performance by Thomas Haden Church. The stalker behavior of the supremely annoying Mary is one thing, but throw in the maudlin cheesy message at the end and you have one horrible movie. I adore Sandra Bullock, but as she was one of the producers of this film, she should be ashamed.

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John said...

Posted on Jan 18 2010 13:41 The Queen of ROMCOM comes unstuck in this unfunny rather sad tale of a woman who is not so much ditzy or cookie but actually two sandwiches short of a picnic and not in a heart warming Forrest Gump way but in a scary person way. My wife and I are Bullock fans but this has to be her worst movie by a country mile she even worse than the Lake House!

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TrickyDicky said...

Posted on Jan 15 2010 18:09 Time Out headlined this film with "Sandra Bullock delivers her worst performance". Has the critic forgotten "The Lake House" - surely nothing could out do that for a worst performance and naff storyline? Ms Bullock seems a magnet to all that is bad in the film industry. I suspect I'll give this one a width berth unless there's absolutely nothing else showing anywhere in the country.

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Marsellus said...

Posted on Jan 14 2010 01:46 I caught this film a couple of months ago in Australia. I watched it with my girlfriend and she really loved it. I'm not so sure about it. Hayden Church was really funny in it but Bullock was annoying. After what could only be described as attempted date-rape on Bradley Cooper, Bullock decides to stalk him across the country. It's difficult to root for the heroine when she does this sort of thing.

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Bob said...

Posted on Jan 13 2010 14:43 The story is not very surprising, but it definitely is original. However, what will stick most after watching this, one rembers one think most: the incredible akwardness of the main character 'Mary'. It is a funny entertaining movie, but not special

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