Yet another WWII love triangle that suffers from bad acting, but looks great!

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2001)

Hollywood strikes again! This is the third World War II love triangle this summer based around a woman who must choose between two soldiers that have fallen for her. Like "Pearl Harbor", the woman believes her lover is dead and falls for another man, and like "Enemy at the Gates", bad accents and poor character development plague the film. Fortunately, this one was based on a popular novel by Louis de Bernieres, written much earlier than the others and was perhaps the only script that truly deserved the green light. The story takes place on the Greek island of Cephalonia, where Italian and German occupation has taken over the otherwise peaceful town. A beautiful young girl named Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) falls for an Italian captain (Nicolas Cage) while she believes that her fiancée, Mandaras (Christian Bale), died in battle. Mandaras returns only to find that Pelagia has given up on him and had already fallen for the mandolin-wielding captain.
Cage and Cruz, while having proven themselves in other films, do not pass for Italian or Greek respectively. The true stars are supporting actors John Hurt, who plays Pelagia's father, Dr. Iannis and Christian Bale (Mandaras). Both have passable Greek accents and seem to fit the parts.
Directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), the film looks great. The scenery is beautiful and the battle sequences are shockingly believable and have an impact. The wide range of emotions in the two-hour span of the film works well, but main problem is that the two main actors just aren't magnetic enough to be believable. While the film had a lot of potential with a winning story, the miscasting is just too hard to look past. It is worth catching in the theatre for a matinee, otherwise just wait for the video.