Joel on Film

If it’s possible for a single performance to make an entire movie slightly more tolerable than it actually is, here is Solo Mio, a romantic comedy that wants to be a drama and doesn’t really know how to be funny. It’s also a family affair—directed by Charles and Daniel Kinnane, co-written by their brothers Patrick and John, and edited by brother Pete (with two others in the fraternal collective, as well as a brother-in-law, serving as executive producers)—which means that we can actually blame this mess of intention and tone on too many cooks in the kitchen and not be entirely inaccurate. At least the internal logic and setting of the idiom is intact.

Still, there is one performance that works here, though it takes some build-up to get the point of mentioning from whom and why. First, we have this overtly strained and contrived plot to deal with, finding Matt Taylor (Kevin James, who also co-wrote the screenplay and works regularly with the sibling filmmakers) jilted at the altar by his fiancée Heather (Julie Ann Emery) and stuck in Rome to wander wonder why. The first sign of trouble is that we never actually get a picture of the relationship between the two, aside from a rosy montage of the trajectory of their relationship from start to engagement.

Is it possible that these two simply weren’t right for each other? Did one of them treat the other in some way that might suggest the end was nigh? These are good questions, and the film raises some other ones, too, along the way, but the Kinnanes and James (who plays Matt as broadly affable, at least) seem uninterested in exploring it.

The sympathetic hotelier (played by Alessandro Carbonara) informs him that all of the couples-oriented venues and events—their honeymoon suite and various activities curated for two—cannot be refunded or rescheduled, meaning that Matt would be out thousands of dollars (and perhaps even tens of thousands, factoring in inflation) if he were simply to go back to the States, where he teaches art to fourth-graders. A big part of the movie, then, is dedicated to Matt, preoccupied with sadness, biking and boating through tours without his alleged beloved. That, obviously, means there will be minor characters sprinkled all throughout this movie.

Meghan (Alyson Hannigan) is utterly harmless and, honestly, without any truly defining characteristics, a statement that certainly does not describe her husband Julian (Kim Coates, distractingly miscast), from whom she has twice been divorced and with whom she is celebrating their third marriage. That’s definitely weird, though not as strange as the relationship between Neil (Jonathan Roumie) and Donna (Julee Cerda), which came about on account of her having been his therapist until recently. If Matt’s story is oddly strained, then, it’s not quite as bizarre as the misadventures of these other couples, who take him in and proceed to teach him a lot of conflicting life lessons.

Finally, though, we get to the really good performance, which comes from Nicole Grimaudo as Gia, a kind and naturally funny café owner currently doing battle with a greedy landlord for the property in which her restaurant resides. Obviously, since this is a romantic comedy-drama-farce-whatever, romantic tension must build between Gia and Matt, but because of Grimaudo’s preternatural ability to play off of James so well, we halfway believe it. Indeed, we almost wish we didn’t, because the rest of the film is often so embarrassing.

That embarrassment circles around to the movie’s overbearing climax, which relies on a lot of strained confrontations and a couple of would-be-shattering truths: the former because of the reason Matt finds himself in the company of Gia and the latter a spoiler no review should even consider revealing. It does, though, jettison Solo Mio from any kind of ability to take it seriously as a romantic comedy and, instead of coming across as romantic, is rather infuriating.

Rating: *½ (out of ****)