This film started so well that it was beginning to look like a hidden gem, a classic in the making. I give this film 5 stars out of 10, but I have to say that the 5 stars are for the first 30 minutes, which were so well done. The remaining 60 minutes deserve a zero.
The comedy is not funny. Slapstick and cheap laughs. Everything is so predictable that we were trying to take bets on the story in the middle of the film, but no one wanted to take any bets. We were all on the same page and guess what? Every single thing we predicted happened. Predicting one thing or another is fine, but not everything.
The movie just drags and drags without direction. You're not sure if it's a story of two Greek brothers, a story of a couple, a story of another couple or a story of a restaurant and a rag-tag team of staff that turn a failure around.
Everything is so contrived you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes in life you can make decisions or take actions that COULD lead to something bad happening. There is that risk in life. But in this film characters take "chances" that almost guarantee an unwanted event. As in, the director wants this event to happen so he has to find a sure-fire way to make it happen. So the characters take actions to ensure this event, even though it is not in their personality to do so.
The expression Americans now use is "because script." People do things that don't make any logical sense in their world, but it makes sense "because script" says so. There was also one bit of incredibly amateur screen writing - a character in another country knew a piece of information that (s)he could not have known in real life (unless they had access to the script somehow!).
The music scenes are too long, some reviewers say "the female characters are flat and without depth" - well you gotta take a closer look at the male characters, friends, because they're cardboard caricatures just the same.
The cinematography and camera work were really good. Locations too. But you can't get too many points for that.
It's a wanna-be feel-good movie that fails terribly at making you feel good or at entertaining you in most ways.
Hopefully someone takes the idea from the first 30 minutes and does something else with it.
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