Leads Josh Duhamel and Kristen Bell are cute. That’s the best thing I can say for this film that is so unfunny it’s downright painful. “Jokes” are met with cringes and squirms, rather than laughter and giggles. As it gracelessly hammers away at the funny bone, viewers leave feeling bruised and battered, rather than tickled and tweaked. Until you realize that the writers are the same ones responsible for Old Dogs, (David Diamond and David Weissman) you wonder just how a romantic comedy can be so lame. Perhaps director Mark Steven Johnson should have stuck to directing comic book hero films like Daredevil and Ghost Rider. Oh wait! Those movies were also duds.

 We are expected to have sympathy for poor, boyfriend-free Beth (Kristen Bell). When will romantic comedy writers stop asking us to believe that young, gorgeous girls with perfect bodies can’t get a decent date, especially when their ‘fatal’ flaw involves being just too darn competent and successful? Men just HATE those qualities, don’t they? Her terrible life is made even worse when her younger sister announces she’s getting married in Rome in a few days. Little sis, by the way, is played by Alexis Dziena, who always looks like she’s about twelve and should be asking Bell to play Barbies, rather than to be her Maid of Honor. Of course at the wedding Beth meets Nick, and an awkwardly contrived wade through the “Fountain of Love” puts up a roadblock to the two melding right on the spot.

 It seems Beth filches a couple of coins off the bottom of the fountain, and the throwers of those coins fall magically in love with her, then somehow turn up in New York to stalk her once Beth returns home. These characters, played by Danny DeVito, Dax Shepard, Jon Heder and Will Arnett are not funny-weird but awkwardly freakish and not even remotely believable. But I will say that the film’s one true moment of comedic genius comes in the casting of the photographer who is documenting magician Lance’s (Heder’s) tricks. Let’s just say that Pedro rides again. Okay, I also admit to being amused by the casting of Beth’s father (Don Johnson) and mother (Peggy Lipton).

Aside from that, there are many reasons to grimace and few reasons to smile. There is never any doubt that Beth and Nick will wind up together, even though she fears that she has picked up his coin, and his amorous attentions are merely the result of the magical spell. There are ridiculous subplots involving an exhibit at the Guggenheim and a lightening strike, that are mind-numbingly contrived, and of course, at the end, there is the obligatory wedding scene, in which everyone ends up living happily ever after – except the audience.

Rated PG-13

—Lisa Johnson Mandell