Oh my, this was bad, a real pain. The only nice things, when the old lady pulled the handbrake and when that girl who gave them a ride on her ‘ape’-van (one of the big ones), kept flirting with Summer, they were sweet :-/ That was the only things that I hadn’t predicted from the very start: instead of an Italian boyfriend, she found an Italian girlfriend. Nice little twist, they were cute, but it was not enough to save the disaster.
Everything else: terrible. Everything. I can’t think of anything that could save this thing. The lines, the story, the acting (Maggie’s flirting was simply embarrassing), everything you can think of basically.
The story:
Maggie goes to Italy to take her daughter away from her bad boyfriend Tyler who wants her to take the blame for him because she’s a minor and he doesn’t want to go to jail :-/
Maggie is a modern woman from New York, but she doesn’t seem to have a problem in driving an old Italian car with manual transmission and she knows perfectly her roads without the help of gps. Wow.
She throws away the girl’s cellphone because she doesn’t want her to know that Tyler made bail and is waiting for her.
As soon as she reaches her destination, Maggie meets again Luca, he was her boyfriend twenty years ago before she married Jack instead. What a coincidence, he lives right there...
She tells her daughter Summer that she hasn’t seen him in twenty years, and yet she immediately says that she thought he was in France...
Summer takes her passport and mom’s credit card and plans to escape back home so she can tell the police that the drugs were hers and save her boyfriend (she might be a teenager, but this stupid?? :-/ )
She walks like a child pouting. Apparently Luca’s mother Carmen keeps running away because she’s determined to go to Rome but doesn’t say why, and Luca says that she’s losing her mind and her memory (which turns out to be nonsense, because she knows exactly what she’s doing and her memory seems to be perfect)
Summer takes Luca’s car; Carmen has the keys, and she’s all “you help me I help you”, so they drive away together. Like her mother, she has no trouble either with the car or with directions.
Maggie is taken aback when Luca introduces her to a girl as his “darling Valentina” and she thinks she’s his girlfriend... I mean, for real??? Come on, should we be surprised when at the end they reveal that she’s his daughter? Seemed clear to me :-/
On the road, Summer stops at a snack bar in the country (not in town, just by the road) and what do you know, they accept credit cards! Wow, really?
Summer tells her story to Carmen, stating that she’s “the only one who can save him”, her Tyler... oh my! Carmen tells her her story in return. She sang in a band when she was young and she was in love with a man, Marcel, but she left him to go home because she had promised to marry someone else, Luca’s father. Last year he died, then she received letters from Marcel and she’s now going to Rome to get married to him... after 50 years of not seeing and not hearing from each other...
Maggie teases Luca as if he’s a playboy who’s never serious with women.. how she can judge him like that since they say they haven’t seen or heard from each other in twenty years???
Carmen tells Summer that Tyler is an asshole who is using her and who has no honour (this was funnier in the Italian version, actually. In English it was plain, but in Italian it was funnier)
Maggie and Luca would have already caught them if they took the same road going after them, which would have been the normal thing to do since they were so close, but Luca decided for a shortcut so they lost them again. Instead of going after them, Luca had another brilliant idea, to go to a friend who works on tv (Giulia Scalzi, Italian name but Spanish accent...) a news announcer, to ask for her help, and what do you know, right away she shows the pictures on tv saying that Summer kidnapped Carmen. Wow.
Maggie shows jealousy towards Giulia, says he has a lady in every town... how stupid is that...
Summer and Carmen stop at a “saloon” where everybody look like cowboys but they don’t speak English (the only believable thing of the whole film) but run away when their pictures appear on tv (that was quick! and what a coincidence the tv was on the news channel..). They they stop and sleep in the car, while Luca takes Maggie to some sort of country grand hotel where they only have one room available (rolling eyes).
Summer and Carmen wake up surrounded by sheep, apparently left unattended (rolling eyes); when Luca and Maggie find the car, they start calling for them, which is obviously the stupidest thing to do since they don’t want to be found, they’re not going to reply, that would be obvious to anyone :-/
Hearing them, Carmen uses a pair of scissors and they cut the other car’s tyres... of course, who doesn’t go around with a pair of scissors.
Who knows for whatever reason, we hear again the song twist twist sang by Rita Pavone. Who choose that?
They run out of gas so Carmen sends Summer to steal some from a truck but she’s caught, so she loses the gas tank, causes a fire and unintentionally frees the chickens there... oh my.
Maggie and Luca have a fight, she’s angry that her daughter is depicted as a kidnapper, when Maggie puts the blame on Carmen instead, saying that she’s “one serious bitch and always has been” ... the nerve, how dare she? She barely knows her.
Summer and Carmen are now without a car (they left it where it was and apparently everyone forgot about it, such a nice car they’ll never see again), so they try hitchhiking, and Carmen lifts Summer’s already short skirt so that someone would stop (really??!?!?!? First, Summer is a minor, second, if someone stops only after seeing her raised skirt, would it be wise to accept that ride?? This is turning more criminal than stupid!). Anyway, in this movies they are always lucky, and instead of an old pervert man the first one passing by is actually a nice girl, who starts flirting with Summer (but in a nice way, keeping her hands to herself). Summer seems flattered and doesn’t sound like before when she mentions that she ‘sort of have a boyfriend’, but to prove that she’s a modern 2019’s girl, instead of asking for her phone number Summer asks her is she’s on facebook... ok, she doesn’t have a phone right now, but that also makes it difficult to go on facebook at the moment, so...
Talking to the police, Maggie describes Summer feeling embarrassed about her piercing and tattoos, trying to defend that as if she wanted to say ‘yes, she has tattoos but she’s not a bad girl’... really? defending her daughter’s tattoos? Because in 2019 someone would think that a girl with a tattoo is a bad girl?? What kind of world does she live in?
While talking to the police, Luca leaves his phone unattended (why??) so she can answer the call instead, and Valentina tells her where they are heading (she found Marcel’s letters), so Maggie takes the car (!!) and drives away leaving him behind, but what do you know, the police take him along with them.
Maggie consults a paper map while driving :-/ because she had no problem driving from Toscana to Rome without it, but now she doesn’t know where to find that specific church.
When Carmen and Summer get there, in the church there’s only Marcel waiting, then a priest appears with to young church boys ready to marry them, just like that, no witnesses, nothing. Really?
Maggie storms in trying to drag Summer away, and shortly after that Luca arrives too (with no police, did they simply give him a ride and wait outside?). There’s a stupid scene when Luca is angry, tells her to think of dad, to which she rightly replies that he’s dead, then he sort of fights with Marcel over her in an embarrassing way, then he causes his mom to fall down and hit her head so she needs hospitalising.
The police arrest Summer because she drove without a licence, because she forged her mom’s signature (at the snack bar we saw her writing her mom’s name... so how did they find out? I mean, are they for real?) and also because she realesed chickens (... she released the chickens...) and she caused a fire (at that same place)... so they arrest her.
Who knows why, now Giulia comes to apologise to Maggie. Why? Was her idea to say Summer kidnapped Carmen, or Luca told her? Who knows. Anyway, Maggie is still jealous and points out to her that she didn’t want ‘to help’, she wanted to ‘help Luca’... which seemed a very lame thing to say right now (she should think of her daughter being arrested and she has time to be stupidly jealous of Luca, specially since she thinks that he’s with Valentina...)
Maggie goes to visit Carmen at the hospital and finds out that Valentina is his daughter (ooooh who would have thought.... :-/ ). She simply goes “oh” and doesn’t tell him anything else about it.
Maggie tells Giulia the whole story, about Carmen and Marcel. Giulia tells her that she tried dating Luca once, but he kept thinking of his old American love... oh my :-/
Summer is at being interrogated by the police when suddenly their commander calls them and tells them to switch on the tv (for real??) and the tv is already on the right channel (all Italy is watching Giulia 24/7 apparently) and they listen to Giulia describing Carmen’s love story (her big, true-love story... really? they barely know each other, haven’t seen for fifty years!!) and how Summer helped her and after all that she’s simply released, they let her go free as a bird, just like that... I have no words.
Now Summer is all proud of her mom. All of a sudden. She hated her guts at the beginning, couldn’t stand her when she saw her again at the almost-wedding, and yet after this now suddenly Maggie is her hero-for-life. Wow. Volatile teenagers, huh?
Summer uses mom’s cellphone to call Tyler (because all of a sudden Maggie is no more bothered by the whole Tyler-thing apparently), and Summer dumps Tyler telling him he has no honour...
Maggie talks to Luca, and learns that Valentina is like 23 or something, so he already had a daughter when they met twenty years ago, but didn’t tell her thinking she might not want a guy with a daughter, and of course she then left so he had no more chances to tell her.
She speaks to him of how Carmen is “very much in love”... (rolling eyes) and she has arranged for her marriage right there at the hospital, with the priest and everything (how much did they pay? is the priest available at her say so? is it ok for him to celebrate at a hospital and not in a church?? are we in America now? )
Luca and Maggie kiss and are now together.
The end..
Almost.
There’s still the song, Carmen and Marcel sing again together (although mostly it’s him singing, she doesn’t sing anything. Well, he was a singer after all), and we see Luca and Maggie happily together, and we also see Summer with that nice girl, hand in hand.
Maggie-Sarah Jessica Parker
Luca-Raoul Bova
Carmen-Claudia Cardinale
Summer-Rosie Day
Giulia-Paz Vega
Marcel (or Marcellino) - Shel Shapiro
and Rocio Munoz as Summer’s girl.
ITA tutte le strade portano a Roma
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