All About Steve

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.