Here’s a film with all the right ingredients which somehow manages to taste bland as a hell. I mean, it’s directed by John Madden , who previously did the wonderful “Shakespeare in Love”, it has a stellar cast led by Nicolas Cage, one of my very favorite actors, and it’s shot by John Toll, who was also the director of photography on “The Thin Red Line”, one of the greatest looking films in recent memory. It’s an adaptation of a Louis de Bernieres novel by screenwriter Shawn Slovo. I haven’t read the book, but had one reviewer go: “If you read nothing else in this life, you must read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”. Okay, this was proclaimed by one of those Epinions.com fangirls but still, how could a best-seller which meant so much to at least that one girl be turned into so forgettable a film?

1940, the beautiful Greek island of Cephallonia, home to doctor Iannis (a hard to recognize but enjoyable John Hurt) and his daughter Pelagia. She’s engaged to local fisherman Mandras (Christian Bale), but she might be more interested in following her father’s foot steps and studying medicine than settling into marriage. Life on the island is good and simple, until the war raging in mainland Europe threatens to come disturb things here too. The Greeks have fought and even on occasion defeated Mussolini’s troops, but when Hitler’s Nazi troops join in, they’re forced to surrender. Enter the Italian army on Cephallonia, trying to take over the island without rocking things to much. Dr. Iannis is ordered to let a Captain stay in his home, which doesn’t please him much until he meets the man. Antonio Corelli (Nicolas Cage) turns out to be not a brutish soldier but a soft-tempered, opera loving, mandolin playing gentleman. And Palagia herself grows to care for this enemy in their home…

Spells trouble, right? Well, not really. For the longest time, the movie is mostly about people hanging around while nothing much happens. All the soldiers seem to do is sing opera, get drunk and flirt with girls. You start wondering whether this is a musical or a war film! There was potential for another “Pearl Harbor” (I mean this as a good thing, I’m one of the few who gave it a positive review last May), with a love triangle set against wartime, but Corelli and Pelagia’s romance is surprisingly inconsequential. You neither get the feeling that their passion is overwhelming or that much is at stake. He gets a boner from watching her dance, she gets wet from hearing him play the mandolin… They roll in the hay, they profess their love and then… Well, nothing ! You’d expect Pelagia’s father to oppose her affair, but he actually approves it. Then, surely, Mandras will fight for his woman, right? Nah, he just mopes a little but does nothing about it. It’s as if the filmmakers purposely avoid any drama, how dull is that!

Eventually, trouble does occur, as the Germans pop in and decide that the Italians haven’t been hard enough on the Greeks, so we get a lot of planes, jeeps, tanks, explosions, soldiers shooting or getting shot… But it’s all mostly just noise, there is little to drive the story. Maybe they could have gone for tear-jerking tragedy, or honourable sacrifice, anything to make the love story more dramatic, but no such thing happens. What twist we get is that **SPOILER WARNING Corelli leaves the island because the Germans want to kill him because he fought on the Greek’s side. Yet I wasn’t moved by how our lovers were separated. I mean, can’t Pelagia just go to frickin’ Italy with him? Where’s the problem? END OF SPOILER** We eventually get the obligatory happy end, but it has no impact: we don’t learn anything, we don’t think anything, we don’t feel anything. Yawn.

I’m not quite sure what went wrong. Cage and Cruz are pretty good. There aren’t much sparks flying between them, but they’re cute together. Cage’s Italian accent is laughable at first, but you get used to it and he seems to have really mastered the mandolin (for those two scenes at least). It’s no great performance, though. The only actor who really leaves a strong impression is Christian Bale, with his manly, proud Mandras, a simple fisherman willing to fight for his country against impossible odds. There’s a fire to him that’s absent from the rest of the film. He’s actually more deserving of getting the girl and the screen time than Corelli. I can’t believe he doesn’t get to beat the girly Italian’s ass and make his girl see that he’s the bigger man. Maybe then this wouldn’t be such a vapid picture. As it is, the only reason to see it is John Toll’s gorgeous cinematography, which offers us such gorgeous sights as blue skies and seas, lush vegetation, rocky earthy hills, sandy white beaches and Penelope Cruz’ naked boobies…