Painful

Rating: 3/10 (19 August 2009)

I haven't read the book so I'm not anal about the movie digressing from the original plot. But it's still a horrible movie. If you want to make a schlocky love movie with Nicholas Cage affecting a risible Italian accent like out of some Little Cesar's Pizza commercial, be my guest. But please show some respect and don't base it on a real tragedy, the bloody German-Italian occupation of Greece in the Second World War and the 1943 massacre of 9000 Italian troops by the Germans.
To be fair to the movie, Penelope Cruz does her usual excellent job of playing an attractive girl who painfully holds out against her romantic feelings before eventually giving in to love. The only problem is that I've seen her in this role before. Other than that, the movie is 1950ies-type of inane. The Greeks are proud archetypes (but hey, daddy's still all for emancipation and that), the Italians are jolly opera boffins, and the Germans uptight, evil maniacs. Beautiful, proud Pelagia is betrothed to a resistance fighter but has the hots for a jaunty Italian soldier. You connect the dots. That's really all there is to it.
The sad thing is that the entire plot's long been done before, a million times better, and with infinitely more charme, in the 1991 Italian movie Mediterraneo. If you like the general idea of a romantic comedy about Italians occupying a Greek island, and going native in the process, you've struck gold. Captain Corelli's Mondolin, on the other hand, is trite sh*te.