Get Him to the Greek; When in Rome

I laughed a lot and aloud during Get Him to the Greek, a vulgar comedy about a music exec (Hill) charged with escorting a faded, drug-abusing rock star (Brand, reviving the character Aldous Snow from his breakthrough film Forgetting Sarah Marshall ) from London to LA's Greek theatre for a career-resurrecting concert. However, when I wasn't laughing, I was fantastically bored. The characterisation is thin and the plot – a nominal race against the clock – has no real tension. That said, Brand plays himself with egomaniacal charisma, while Hill (from Superbad ) is growing into a decent comedian. Kristen Bell, who makes a brief cameo in Get Him to the Greek and was Brand's co-star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall , takes the lead in When in Rome , this week's lame rom-com. She plays a career-oriented art curator (at the Guggenheim in New York) who, attending her sister's wedding in Rome, takes coins from the "Fontana di Amore" and sparks an ancient curse whereby the coins' owners fall madly in love with her. The suitors are played by irritating American actors vaguely familiar from other comedies, although one of them is Danny DeVito, as a sausage tycoon: "Encased meat is my passion." The general lack of comic inspiration is overwhelming.