How can I put into words how completely worthless I find the reprehensible All About Steve? How's this? Stop reading this review. Forget this movie even exists. It's not worth your brain power for the 90 seconds it would probably take you to get to the zero-star rating at the bottom of this piece. Think about anything BUT All About Steve. It's better for the sake of the collective human consciousness. Easily one of the worst movies of the year (if not the decade), there is not one redeeming quality to All About Steve, an offensive film morally, socially, and to the institution of comedy.

Perhaps one of the reasons I respond so vehemently to junk like All About Steve is that I can't stand what I call hypocritical comedy – the kind of screenwriting that asks you to point and laugh at the abnormalities of a character but then just give her a big hug at the end as it encourages you to embrace your individuality. You can't have it both ways. You can't mock a character for their individuality (or, in this case, possible mental handicap) and then try to pull at heartstrings with a theme about being true to yourself.

The character in question this time is Mary (Sandra Bullock), a crossword puzzle writer for a Sacramento newspaper who lives at home and talks to her pet rodent named Carol. Mary is mocked by co-workers and even ridiculed by students as she's advised to "be normal." In the pursuit of such a lofty goal, she goes on a blind date with Steve (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman for a major news network. When the tragically lonely Mary doesn't even let Steve start the car before she tries to rip his clothes off, our "hero" realizes that his blind date isn't playing with a full deck and makes up an excuse about having to go on the road for his job. Mary writes up a crossword about her new crush (which apparently gets published without a single pair of eyes looking at it for one second), gets fired for doing so, and stalks Steve around the country on a series of news assignments with reporter Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church), including a Gulf Coast hurricane assignment (no, I'm not kidding), a story about a baby with a third leg, and some hearing impaired kids that fell down a well.

The stalker concept behind All About Steve isn't that horrible. It's the execution of one of the worst screenplays I've ever seen put to film. All About Steve only works if we find Mary likable and relatable, not creepy and possibly handicapped (her behavior is not far off from the title character in Adam, a film about a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome). The message of All About Steve doesn't seem to be "it's okay to be yourself" as much as "it's okay to stalk somebody as long as everyone survives." And the fact is that Mary seems to be a woman who struggles to communicate with anyone on even the most basic level. It's okay to be yourself, but it's also okay to get therapy.

What really takes All About Steve from bad to offensive is the final act, one which actually tries to pull at the heartstrings with a child in jeopardy and a monologue from Mary about individuality. Don't fall for cheap screenwriting attempts at manipulation. It's the worst kind of cinema, film that takes a real-life issue like social awkwardness and plays it for uncomfortable comedy and then unbelievable manipulation. If you’ve made it this far, perhaps nothing summarizes my feelings about the film better than this, I've never walked out of a film in my life, but if I wasn't assigned to cover All About Steve, I never would have made it to the credits.

Rating: WOOF!