The eighties, like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, simply refuse to go away. Hence, this summer, The A-Team is coming to a multiplex near you, they've remade The Karate Kid and Don Johnson is back on our screens as the father-of-the-bride in this good-natured Disney confection. Miami Vice fanatics should not get overly excited; the target audience here live in pink bedrooms and cite The Princess Diaries as their favourite film of all time. The rest of us, however, may take solace from a Napoleon Dynamite inspired subplot, some pleasingly goofy sight gags and one very nice nod to The Wizard Of Oz.
Proudly unrealistic and unabashedly sentimental, swap around details and When In Rome could easily have formed the basis of a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera. Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) stars as a New York career girl whose job at the Guggenheim leaves little time or inclination left over for romance. But something very rom-com happens after she visits an Italian fountain of love; four enchanted suitors including Jon Heder's persistent street magician, Danny DeVito's sausage magnate, Dax Shepard's preening male model and Will Arnett's foot fetishist painter chase our heroine all the way back to America. Just to complicate matters, she ends up falling for sports writer Josh Duhamel. But is it true love or is he simply under the fountain's implausible spell?
Capably performed, serviceably scripted and fluffy as hell, it might be adolescent but if you have to see just one enchanted Italian monument movie this season, we would recommend When In Rome over the sappier Letters To Juliet.