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The premises of Hollywood romantic comedies get sillier by the hour, so it’s not surprising that “When in Rome” is farfetched. But it’s not just farfetched—it’s really out of the ballpark. Still, though the premise is goofier than most, it might have yielded an amusing fantasy had the script been well worked out and the picture well executed. But that’s probably too much to have hoped of the writers of “Evolution” and “Old Dogs” and the director of “Daredevil” and “Ghost Rider.” They aren’t, and the result is a truly lame, irritating bundle of fluff.

The idea is that Beth (Kristen Bell), one of those hard-driving, loveless New York dames who are obligatory in such stories (here she’s an event coordinator bossed around by the haughty Celeste, played grimly by Anjelica Huston), goes to Rome for her younger sister’s impetuous wedding, where she’s charmed by the Italian groom’s American best man Nick (Josh Duhamel). But when she mistakenly concludes that he’s involved with another woman, she jumps into the nearby Fountain of Love and angrily takes five coins that have been thrown into it by hopeful dreamers as a sign of her contempt for romance. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s a legend—isn’t there always?—that if you take somebody’s coin, they’ll fall madly in love with you.

So when she gets back to the Big Apple, she finds herself uncomfortably wooed by four cartoon guys: avuncular sausage magnate Al (Danny DeVito), preening male model Gale (Dax Shepard), shaggy painter Antonio (Will Arnett) and goofy street magician Lance (Jon Heder). Also by Nick, who turns out to be a sports writer. The big issue is how she’ll break the spell on them all, of course, but in the process she finds herself falling for Nick; and the question is whether she’ll be willing to keep him devoted to her through the magic rather than freeing him from its supposed control.

One can imagine that even a scenario this contrived could have been rescued by some cleverness and wit. But it hasn’t been. The writing is sitcom-level awful—you know you’re in trouble when one of the most frequently-repeated gags is that Nick has a habit of walking into things or falling down holes, one cruelly protracted sequence is built around a bunch of people stuffed into a tiny car, and a sequence set in one of those restaurants where you eat in total darkness has the feel of a bad SNL sketch (the final explanation of who threw the poker chip Beth takes to be Nick’s is really terrible, too)—and the characters are mostly annoying rather than endearing. That’s certainly true of the heroine, whom Bell plays with an insistently cutesy quality that seems desperate, and only slightly less so of Nick, whom Duhamel makes into a toned-down version of the guy Vince Vaughn usually plays.

But though the leads are an uninspired pair, it’s the supporting figures who really sink things. Of the four suitors, only DeVito—rather more subdued than he ordinarily is—is at all palatable. Arnett is simply dull, and both Heder and Shepard are grating. (If the writers had had any pluck, they would have had at least one of the suitors be a woman.) And they’re not even the worst. Nick’s best buddy Puck is meant to be a lovably sardonic sidekicks, but as played by SNL’s Bobby Moynihan he’s like fingers on a blackboard, and Beth is stuck with Stacy (bug-eyed Kate Micucci), an assistant so dimwitted you’d like to slap her. And Keir O’Donnell takes crude stereotyping to astronomical heights as a supposedly newly-minted Italian priest. In this crowd Don Johnson, as Beth’s oft-married father, actually seems good, though the performance is inconsequential.

Trying anew genre after his super-hero flicks, Mark Steven’s Johnson’s direction is bland, papering over the inadequacies of the script with endless musical montages. (One really can’t blame him: chunks of plot seem to have been lopped out of the picture, which you can’t complain about too much, given its quality, but it still makes for choppiness you have to try camouflaging somehow.) The production, including the cinematography by ?????, is better than the material deserves.

Even in the avalanche of terrible Hollywood romantic comedies, this one is particularly inane.