Metascore
17 out of 100

Overwhelming dislike - based on 27 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 27
  2. Negative: 24 out of 27
  1. Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    75
    Bullock, easing into her mid-40s with box-office mojo intact, remains the star attraction as the annoyingly endearing Mary. You simply can't imagine another actor of her stature pulling it off.
  2. 70
    Refreshingly quirky comedy.
  3. There are good movies to be made about romantic obsession, but the premise doesn't work if the crazy stalker isn't juxtaposed with a sympathetic victim.
  4. 38
    The screenplay by Kim Barker requires Bullock to behave in an essentially disturbing way that began to wear on me. It begins as merely peculiar, moves on to miscalculation and becomes seriously annoying.
  5. There's nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn't fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.
  6. Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.
  7. Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    38
    Manages to be both toothless and tasteless in its satire of TV news sensationalism.
  8. A viewer is challenged to guess what the filmmakers thought they were doing. A 1930s screwball comedy with a modern sensibility? A misguided valentine to those who march to the beat of a different drummer?
  9. Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    30
    If it's about anything at all, the lame new comedy All About Steve is mostly about Mary, a logorrheic crossword compiler with too much arcane information in her head -- and the social skills of an excitable 6-year-old boy.
  10. Reviewed by: Amy Biancolli
    25
    There's no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms.
  11. 25
    Bullock does her damndest to be nerdy and instead becomes excruciatingly artificial - a malfunctioning verbal fun machine.
  12. A creepy, humiliating ''comedy,'' playing to Bullock's worst instincts for demonstrating the lovability of women who don't fit in.
  13. Since Bullock coproduced this masochistic venture, it seems she buys into the idea that fluffer-nut ditziness is what she does best. Except it isn't.
  14. 20
    A talented director might have made Bullock seem like a comic genius, but Phil Traill has no control over tone, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh or cry.
  15. Indisputably awful comedy.
  16. 20
    Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.
  17. Reviewed by: Robert Abele
    20
    A dippy clunker like All About Steve has no purpose other than as a challenge: If you laden a usually charming A-lister with a thoroughly off-putting, unhinged character, can she claw her way to likability? The short answer is no. The long answer is, what in the world was Bullock, who also produced the movie, thinking?
  18. The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.
  19. 20
    Much of what's offensive and insufferable about All About Steve can be laid at the feet of screenwriter Kim Barker, best known for inflicting "License to Wed" on the world. Why do these people still earn obscene amounts of money churning out dreck? And why do stars like Bullock keep paying them?
  20. Reviewed by: Brian Lowry
    10
    Sitting through the picture is an endurance test.
  21. Reviewed by: Joanne Kaufman
    10
    A head-banging excuse for a comedy.
  22. 0
    Unwatchable, unbearably unfunny farce.
  23. 0
    Insulting, witless comedy.
  24. 0
    Grotesquely unfunny comedy.
  25. Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    0
    Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock's entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.
  26. Reviewed by: Cliff Doerksen
    0
    Packaged as a romantic comedy but devoid of comedy or romance, this baffling train wreck stars Sandra Bullock as a tediously kooky constructor of crossword puzzles for a Sacramento newspaper.
  27. 0
    How do you make a movie about a protagonist so profoundly irritating that even her loved ones barely tolerate her? And how do you avoid annoying audiences to the point of distraction in the process?
User Score

Generally unfavorable- based on 90 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 11 out of 52
  2. Negative: 35 out of 52
  1. JackD
    0
    Gigantic piece of donkey **** If anyone enjoys this movie even remotely they need to see a psychiatrist or commit seppuku for betraying the human race. I'm extremely disgusted that I wasted an hour and a half watching this "movie." Full Review »
  2. I don't know where to start. I'm not sure what I just watched but I know I don't like the way I feel nor exactly how to describe it. A little disturbed perhaps....... discombobulated even (I've been wanting to use that for ages). Such a weird movie, I want to remove the memory of it from my brain and I never want to see red boots again. Although with the sound down she looked amazing in them. It's driven me to write this, my first review ever because of the profoundly diminishing effect it had on what should be my happy times. Thankfully it was on tv so it didn't cost me anything other than 90 minutes of my life damn it. I don't even really know who to blame, probably the screenwriter. Certainly not Sandra Bullock; unless I read the screenplay (I never will) I couldn't even judge whether her acting was deserving of the razzie as she may have actually performed an Oscar-worthy turn in this movie, more so than the Blind Side. You can't blame the casting agents- they've got some great talent in the film. Sandra Bullock's agent, however, should have talked her out of this one. Anyway Church was good, Cooper was not as good as usual and Jeung's brilliant comedic talent and timing was wasted in a pathetic sidekick role (to a secondary character) without any punchy lines or even sight gags- or maybe his shirt and tie was funny? The plot could have worked as you don't really need much of a plot for romcoms. For example (and i will sell this to the highest bidder) misfit meets completely unlikely partner, don't see eye to eye at first, become friends and start hanging out, one has a partner and some funny penis-size related gags occur, one falls for the other and declares undying love, uh-oh! non- reciprocated undying love awwwwww, can't be friends anymore because too embarrassed, non-reciprocator suddenly realises through a montage of slow- motion (seemingly innocuous at the time) experiences from throughout the movie (with greenday's time of your life in the background) that what they've been missing all their life was there right in front of them all that time so they should run to the rejected purveyor of undying love but what's this? It's too late, the embarrassed purveyor moved on with someone very lovely blah blah blah they break up and the original two get together in the unlikeliest of circumstances and probably finish the movie on a gag that leaves us laughing and feeling good as we walk out.  I did not have this feeling as the credits rolled on All About Steve and I think I have figured out the reason for this in the last couple of weeks as I can pick a stinker of a movie or two. Here is my theory- it is very hard to produce a great movie without a likable protagonist. Case in point, Against The Ropes (or something like that) starring Meg Ryan and Omar Epps. Both have had very good careers at certain stages and played some truly memorable roles that I unfortunately can't remember right now. Anyway, the fact that Meg Ryan's character was so imminently unlikeable in any way prevented me from wanting her to succeed or have anything but bad things happen to her. So with a plot that (employing more than a little license) told the real life story of a female boxing promoter, I found myself googling the plot halfway through the movie and hoping some misery would befall her to assuage my desire for her downfall.  Therein lies the problem with All About Steve. I didn't like any of the characters but most importantly I didn't like Mary **** she was annoying and paradoxically (but admittedly commonplace in the real world) both super-intelligent and a complete moron depending on what the particular scene called for. I wanted her to drown in that well and if I had anything to do with orchestrating the rescue she would still be down there now scratching crossword puzzles into the wall that would one day be unearthed and  revered by future generations as proof of higher intelligence amongst their cave-dwelling primate predecessors. the end. Full Review »
  3. 5
    It really wasn't that bad. I don't quite understand all of the hate. It wasn't all that funny, but it wasn't a "Gigantic piece of donkey **** or "the most pathetic attempt at humor i have ever seen" or even "sewerific". I could sit through it, and it was kind of fun. Full Review »