In this world, everyone with a job has occupational hazards. Attorneys must deal with long hours. Bartenders must deal with cranky drunks. Garbage men must deal with incredibly foul garbage. As a movie critic, sometimes I must deal with, well, incredibly foul garbage. But nothing in my experience could prepare me for the outrageous depths of putridity I faced in \View from the Top.""
The movie centers around Donna (Gwyneth Paltrow), a young Nevada woman who is unhappy with her stagnant life. She becomes a flight attendant on a small airline, where she becomes friends with co-workers and flies for the first time. During her down time, she meets Ted (Mark Ruffalo), a law student taking time off, who she begins to date. After learning the ropes, she and her friends train to work at a more prominent airline. At the new airline, Donna not only reluctantly leaves Ted to pursue her career, but also is stuck on an unappealing commuter route, when she had worked hard to land an international route. The movie follows her struggle to prioritize her love life and to reach her goal of working an international route.
Summing up the flaws of ""View from the Top"" is sort of like counting the blades of grass on Bascom Hill, but the writing stands out most. The story is empty and stupid. There is no character development, which restricts all the humor to a low level. But then the jokes stoop even lower, often reduced to fifth-grade level gay jokes. The love story is written in such an empty, generic way that it's hard to care what happens. Characters enter and leave the story awkwardly. As for the dialogue and plot progression, there is never a sense of real tension or drama, which only works in cool and funny movies like ""Get Shorty."" Meanwhile, the story feels like it runs 20 minutes too long, which is pretty absurd for an 86-minute movie.
Then there's the cast. I have always felt Paltrow to be overrated. I have always thought that her best movies ""Seven"" and ""The Royal Tennenbaums"" are movies with enough charming and interesting qualities to compensate for the lack of those qualities in Paltrow herself. Still, unless she secretly kicks puppies and clubs baby manatees with two-by-fours for fun, Paltrow has never done anything to deserve a role this bad in a movie this bad. She is not off the hook, though, because she actually makes the movie worse with an unfelt performance that features an inconsistent accent, a lack of comedic delivery and terrible voiceover work.
As for the rest of the cast, it's a mixed bag of misplaced famous people. Rob Lowe has a pointless and distracting cameo. Kelly Preston fills an insignificant role that should have been filled by an unknown. Christina Applegate ably demonstrates that the only talent she ever really had was looking good in a miniskirt when she was a teenager. Ruffalo is irritating as Paltrow's love interest, delivering an afternoon special-style, saccharine performance. Joshua Malina (""The West Wing,"" ""The American President""), a really likeable and respectable actor, is present here only to be the butt of his character's own amateurish gay jokes and Stacey Dash (""Clueless"") has a distractingly small role. Candice Bergen, meanwhile, manages to one-up the horror of her role in ""Sweet Home Alabama.""
Saddest of all is Mike Myers' role. In the commercials, he makes the movie look like something potentially watchable. Instead, Myers offers a banal performance, which only pokes its head above mediocrity enough to cast further light on what is lacking in the rest of his performance and the movie at large. Myers makes so few movies that it really is a pity for him to waste his considerable talent on such crap.
In the end, ""View from the Top"" is a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor funny. Mostly, though, it is a horrendous atrocity of a movie, worse than any I have seen since ""Kung Pow: Enter the Fist."" Yes, it is even worse than ""Simone."" Unless you are seriously masochistic, please don't see this movie.
