Passionate people lacking only passion

Rating: 5/10 (17 February 2002)

How much spaghetti can one actor load up into his accent and still maintain his integrity? The answer is elusive, Nicholas cage went beyond the spaghetti test on this one, it was an embarrassment to listen to him. Next question, can one of the world's more beautiful women with lips the size of the state of Georgia actually carry off a young woman from remote Greek island? They got the hair right and the make up was good, but those lips, not in a million years of evolution would those lips be found on a Greek island in 1940. Too bad because Penelope Cruz was the best thing in the movie. She tried, almost everyone else was a two dimensional cutout, from the handsome fisherman turned resistance fighter (we know he is a leader because he has a beard) to the opera singing artillerymen of Corelli's battery (but they could sing!).
So it is a love story, or so we are led to believe, but who is really in love here? and why? In concept I can believe that these two (Cage and Cruz) fall in love, but there is so little chemistry that it is fortunate that the good doctor is pushing the relationship (but why?).
For 90 minutes pretty much nothing happens which may be a reflection of how exciting duty was in Greece for the Italian army, but the ten minutes of bloodshed that comes is so much counter to the story that it seems gratuitous (what can we do for the men in the audience, oh let's shoot some people and blow up stuff) then there is the ending, are they in love? You tell me. We have Italians and Greeks, the world's models for passionate people, and yet I hardly could feel a moment of real tenderness or joy (the one exception coming when Cruz is thrown into the water by her Greek fisherman boy friend. It was the one scene that seemed to flow from passion and the playfulness of love.