Driving Aphrodite

Shelved for over a year and rebranded for the UK as 'Driving Aphrodite', Nia Vardalos' My Life In Ruins is a mis-fire of a comedy driven by a creative team that should really know better. Husband and wife producing team Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson struck box-office gold with 2002's My Big Fat Greek Wedding, also starring Vardalos, and have been trying to capture lightening twice by relying on her heritage to try and steer a course back to financial providence.

Nia plays Georgia, a Greek-American tour guide who is consistently lumbered with what she considers the worst type of tourists: those that would prefer to shop for souvenirs and go to the beach rather then learn anything of the cultural importance of the land which they are visiting. She is consistently usurped by Nico, her rival in tour guides (a quite appalling stereotype played by impressionist Alistair McGowan in arguably his biggest role to date, who could surely do so much better than being saddled with such a crass cliché), and as such receives her group for the next trip around Greece, which number the stuck up British, the beer-swilling Australians and the rotund Americans.

What's so galling is the lack of intelligence it proffers the audience, serving everything up in the most black and white terms. When we are introduced to the (undoubted) love interest, driver Procopi “Poupi” Kakas, the level of comedy sinks to that of a giggling teenager and rarely rises for the interminable running time. Richard Dreyfuss bumbles along as Irv, the man who brings Georgia back her mojo (seriously, when he is not sleeping with two Italian divorcees, even though he bemoans the fact that nothing is the same without his wife - a brief and bizarre cameo from co-producer Rita Wilson). Judging by the pedigree both in front of and behind the camera - the director is Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality) and the script was by Mike Reiss (many episodes of The Simpsons) - and the fact that much of it was filmed is Spain, this is merely one big, fat Greek calamity.



Released on DVD on 8th February 2010 by Warner Home Entertainment.

Written by Simon Cole.