My Life in Ruins

by KYW's Bill Wine

Her Greek driver is anything but big and fat.  And there's no wedding.  At least, not yet.
 
But Nia Vardalos, who made mainstream movie moneymaking magic as the writer and star of 2002's My Big Fat Greek Wedding, tries to extend the goodwill she generated in that surprise hit.
 
Alas, her latest comedy does eventually generate a degree of warmth, but precious little else.
 
Vardalos plays Georgia, a Greek-born American classics professor recently transplanted to Greece who works as a tour guide while she waits for her drab life to improve.
 
Her self-psychoanalyzed problem is that she has lost her kefi (Greek for "mojo"), which might be part of the reason why she cannot seem to keep her tourist listeners interested in her dry-as-dust lectures about ancient Greece during the four-day rides she hosts to historical landmarks.
 
Her other problems include her colleague and rival tour guide (Alistair McGowan), with whom she is in competition for just about everything job-connected, including a better class of client and the air-conditioned bus; and the collection of caricatured American, British, Australian, Canadian, and Spanish tourists (played by the likes of Richard Dreyfuss, Rachel Dratch, Caroline Goodall, and Harland Williams), whose stereotypical eccentricities, gauche behavior, cultural illiteracy, and ceaseless demands drive her bananas.
 
Of course, there's also her cute tour-bus driver (Alexis Georgoulis).  But so far they might as well be in different countries.
 
Dreyfuss, as the first among equals in the tourist ensemble, brings some life and unforced pathos to his grieving, advice-dispensing, wiseacre widower, but he too is defeated by the lame and unimaginative script.

Donald Petrie (Grumpy Old Men, Miss Congeniality, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Mystic Pizza) directs with a sledgehammer, pummeling us with every obvious joke and giving his cast much more room to roam than is good for them or us.
   
Someone with a more knowing hand should certainly have critiqued the array of line readings: everyone but the talented Vardalos or old pro Dreyfuss needs reining in in sunny Greece.   Extravagant mugging seems to be the tactic of choice.
 
Petrie lets his several crowd scenes deteriorate into thespian chaos, with everyone emoting (that is, overacting) at once.
    
And there's always the handy closeup on a punchline lest anyone in the second balcony misses a joke. 

Greece looks great, of course, but the final tally (to crib from A Chorus Line) is:  "Scenery 10, Scenario 4."
 
Petrie doesn't seem to know or care whether we buy any of this or not.  Consequently, we don't.
 
Executive-producer spouses Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson (the latter taking a cameo role), who also produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding, have concocted a travel farce that might work for certain audiences as a vicarious vacation, but that as a dramedy never leaves home.
 
So, if it's Tuesday, this must be 2 stars out of 4 for My Life in Ruins.  Otherwise known as, "Nia Vardalos Went to the Acropolis and the Parthenon, and all she Brought Us was This Darn Movie."