Starring: Nia Vardalos, Richard Dreyfuss, Alexis Georgoulis, Simon Gleeson, and Natalie O'Donnell
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
Runtime: 95 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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This is a romantic comedy that satirizes tourists and the countries they come from. Nia Vardalos, who wrote and directed the popular “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, plays the role of a travel guide, Georgia, who works for the company, Pangloss Tours. Georgia is allocated deliberately a bus-load of difficult and demanding tourists. Her bus is run-down and not air-conditioned. She is an up-tight ex-history Professor who has turned tour guide, and she feels it is her job to show the tourists the historical beauty of Greece on a four-day bus tour of the country. She does that in a particularly dull way that doesn’t endear her at all to her group. Richard Dreyfuss plays the role of a wise widower, Irv, who wants Georgia to lighten up, and Alexis Georgoulis plays the romantic lead, Poupi Kakas (double entendre intended), who wins her over. Simon Gleeson and Natalie O’Donnell are two Australians who join the group. Georgia keeps on giving them all a history lesson instead of telling them what they really want to hear, which is about the joys of shopping, being romantic, and going to the beach. At the start, the people on the tour bus don’t like her, but fortunate for her, there are some on the bus, who want to help, and Irv does just that.
The Director, Donald Petrie (who gave us “Miss Congeniality), tries to do what he can, but he is not helped much by an erratic script. At the start of the film, the script unmercifully wisecracks at the expense of others by using cultural generalities to make one laugh. But after a while, the people on the bus become likeable, and the movie turns into a warm film that one can enjoy more comfortably. This is a movie where the stereotypes keep firing. Slowly, the tour bus becomes a melting pot of humanity, though Georgia resists almost to the end finding her direction in life (in the ruins, so justifying the movie’s aptly chosen title). On the journey, before everyone turns into better human beings, the Americans are painted as obnoxious, the British as terrible snobs, and the Australians as people who like beer far too much and love foul-mouthed talk. Handicapped people also get a look-in, and the bus driver (Poupi Kakas), who is Greek, turns himself into his country’s sex symbol to be impossibly attractive to Georgia. Just in case the comic effect of the movie might be lost, the film includes ethnic toilet humour to drive its point home. But there are some good laughs in-between. One of those occurs when the tour group is accommodated in a run-down hotel where everything goes wrong and nothing works, and the male clerk at the reception desk offends Georgia by asking for sex to pay for his posting her letter. On tour, also, there is an elderly lady, who constantly shop-lifts and picks pockets, with some surprising results.
This is a tour group that moves through some spectacular scenery, and Greece supplies a very good country to see it, despite the behaviour of those on the bus. The photography in the movie is good, with some excellent camera work by Justin Savage; and traditional Greek music enlivens the mood. The movie is popular in Greece, and it improves appreciably after one learns the stereotypes are not intended to be true. As a feel-good movie in the end it is quite entertaining, and good fun should be had by most, if not by all.
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