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A screwball comedy that's misguided

Among the many mysteries of All About Steve (mystery #1: Why?) is the rationale behind its insufferably kooky protagonist's choice of footwear: the same pair of cherry red go-go boots, every day, every night.

Among the many mysteries of All About Steve (mystery #1: Why?) is the rationale behind its insufferably kooky protagonist's choice of footwear: the same pair of cherry red go-go boots, every day, every night.

A crossword puzzle constructor for a Sacramento newspaper, Mary Horowitz - played with alarming pep by Sandra Bullock - trots around town beaming proprietarily as she spies this person and that, on the bus or in a park, laboring over her crosswords.

And everywhere she goes, she's in those boots.

Much later on in this disastrously antic stalker comedy, when Mary finds herself trapped in a mine shaft with a cute little deaf girl (don't ask), she finally explains.

"I wear red boots all the time," Mary says, gasping for air, "because they make my toes feel like 10 friends on a camping trip."

Can All About Steve get any cuter?

A misguided screwball character study, All About Steve clearly isn't about Steve at all. He's just a TV news cameraman, a manly McGuffin that the chronically single Mary meets on a blind date. Things start off promisingly enough, but before you can say "I'll get the bra strap," Steve (Bradley Cooper) realizes that Mary's just too wacko for his taste - for one thing, she's a chronic yammerer - and makes his excuses.

That doesn't stop Mary from dogging Steve around the Southwest as he, his news-reporter partner, Hartman Hughes (Sideways' Thomas Haden Church), and their producer, Angus (Ken Jeong, the crazed Vegas mobster who harassed Cooper in The Hangover), zig from one breaking news story to the next. There's a hostage crisis in an Old West tourist town, a baby born with three legs, wild weather in Texas, and so on. . . .

Directed by Phil Traill, a veteran of British television comedies and chat shows, from a screenplay by License to Wed's Kim Barker (another laff riot!), All About Steve 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, and the supporting players (from Road Trip's DJ Qualls to Katy Mixon to an unrecognizable Howard Hesseman as Mary's dad) huff and puff in the black hole of this comedic dud.EndText