This film is so bad I honestly fail to understand how so many people can find it not only good but even "one of the best rom-coms ever". I will not talk in detail about the plot because you can find many other synopses online.
-Speaking about sexism, this film has serious issues with gender relationships as well. Hunt's husband is shown in the beginning to be blatantly sexist, possessive, verbally abusive and prone to anger, and is then also revealed to be a cheater. You would think that such a toxic relationship would be discouraged, possibly with Hunt managing to find someone better, right? No. After two days her husband comes to Italy, makes a two-second apology, tells his wife that he loves her and everything is immediately forgiven. After this, as far as we can tell, he resumes his former bully-like behaviour.
And how about Peter? After Faith turns him down he essentially becomes a stalker, and even hires a friend to pretend to be Damon Bradley and act like an a-hole to drive her back to him. At the end of the film, she realizes that she is in love with him, apparently forgetting all about the fact that he was literally following her with a binocular and paid another guy to publicly molest her and touch her inappropriately. And these are not exaggerations, watch the film and you will find these exact scenes as I have described them.
So, all in all, an embarrassing work. I would advise you against it, but I admit it was pretty funny to watch it and cringe and laugh and scream in anger at every scene with other people. It's horrible though.
- Pretty much all the characters are unbearable (maybe with the exception of Bonnie Hunt's one), especially the protagonist. We are supposed to empathize with this extremely childish woman who gets completely invested in this "name" delusion and not for one minute regrets or even has second thoughts about leaving her fiancé to throw herself in the arms of a complete stranger. Not only that, she then basically falls in love with RDJ's character (Peter) but when she finds out he's not really Damon Bradley she pushes him away in disgust as though he was molesting her. You could write an entire review about how insufferable this character is but I'll stop here because I also wanna touch other topics.
- As an Italian, I can tell you that this movie's portrayal of Italy is one of the most offensive and stereotypical ones I have ever seen in a foreign film. Nevermind the geographical/cultural nonsense (playing O'Sole Mio when they arrive in Venice is like playing a Texan country song in a scene about the New Yorker elite), basically every Italian character either says something stupid and sexist or tries his best to get in bed with the two protagonists. The highlight in all this is without a doubt the scene where Bonnie Hunt consults a random waiter about her husband cheating on her. He basically tells her that since the other woman was not the ex-wife, Hunt's sister or another of her relatives, what he did is perfectly fine and he has even been very good in keeping it all a secret and not have any rumors about it spread around. Do I need to comment on this?
-Speaking about sexism, this film has serious issues with gender relationships as well. Hunt's husband is shown in the beginning to be blatantly sexist, possessive, verbally abusive and prone to anger, and is then also revealed to be a cheater. You would think that such a toxic relationship would be discouraged, possibly with Hunt managing to find someone better, right? No. After two days her husband comes to Italy, makes a two-second apology, tells his wife that he loves her and everything is immediately forgiven. After this, as far as we can tell, he resumes his former bully-like behaviour.
And how about Peter? After Faith turns him down he essentially becomes a stalker, and even hires a friend to pretend to be Damon Bradley and act like an a-hole to drive her back to him. At the end of the film, she realizes that she is in love with him, apparently forgetting all about the fact that he was literally following her with a binocular and paid another guy to publicly molest her and touch her inappropriately. And these are not exaggerations, watch the film and you will find these exact scenes as I have described them.
So, all in all, an embarrassing work. I would advise you against it, but I admit it was pretty funny to watch it and cringe and laugh and scream in anger at every scene with other people. It's horrible though.