Well, it all comes back ten minutes into Captain Corelli's Mandolin, when you realise that all the characters are going to speak English, but their stagy accents are meant to tell you whether they are speaking Greek, Italian,German or even English. Anyway, so Nic Cage is Captain Corelli, a big lovable Italian who sings Verdi the whole time and plays mandolin. Corelli is part of the occupation force on the Greek island of Cephallonia in 1941, but that's almost irrelevant because the Italians are so lovably Italian that the Greeks get to enjoy being oppressed.
Cage can be terrible or great, depending on the movie.
Here he's terrible. Cruz, meanwhile, gets more irritating by the film. They have a yawning lack of chemistry between them. And that's before you get into the politics of the film, which make Mussolini's army seem like the greatest guys in the history of the world. Perhaps the only way to enjoy this lobtomised romance is to treat it a very pretty two hour long postcard of the Greek islands.