Movie Review: “From Italy with Amore,” a wet noodle from Edmonton

“From Italy with Amore” is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight.

It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

The “Italy” here is a “we make our own pasta for our ‘authentic’ cuisine” eatery, apparently a novelty in Edmonton, Alberta.

That’s the unnamed setting, a city that presents itself as too lovely to deserve hosting the blandest romance ever filmed on that side of the border.

Ariel (Rebecca Dalton) is a features writer for a magazine/website named “Glow,” a career woman who is lovelorn but who has her ideal in mind.

“Six feet tall, strong build, chiseled” features, with “good eyes, a radiant smile.” And he should “drive a yellow sports car.”

That’s what Mr. Must-Be-Right pulls up in the moment she mentions this list to bestie Jules (Kara Duncan), who kidnapped her from the office for lunch on her birthday.

So the hunk with model good looks (Brendan Morgan) has to be made for her. And the good looking co-owner of Vicky’s Bistro, Daniel (Marcus Rosner) barely merits a second glance.

Jules notices him, but Ariel mermaids right past the guy serving them to the guy he’s giving an espresso. To put herself in yellow sports car Jamie’s field of vision, she’ll have to show up at Vicky’s Bistro, day after day, as it soft-reopens before Daniel and his chef brother Tony (Stafford Perry), gay and finally close to adopting a baby with his husband, stage their grand re-opening.

Maybe if she pitches an “Italian comfort food” feature to her “mst popular wellness magazine in the country” editor, she’ll kill two birds with one stone, and get the big promotion at work to boot.

That throws our blonde reporter together with the cuisine-championing, market-visiting, family business man Daniel, who is smitten but whom Ariel needs to shy away from because Jules is interested, and besides, Ariel’s ideal has that yellow sports car.

I mean, she “manifested” her “ideal man.” Who is she to argue with the universe?

The cooking is de-emphasized, so the “Italy” come-on in the film’s title is pretty much a total bait and switch. The cuisine we glimpse is underwhelming.

The leads are bland, the “chemistry” has no heat to it and the situations, all the way down to the gay couple who needs Tony and Daniel’s restaurant to succeed over the chain joint across the way (“The Olive Branch,” cute) in order to be able to adopt, are tepid.

This clunker is about as appetizing as a can of Chef Boyardee, and just as sexy as it is appetizing.

Maybe next time you’re making a movie in under-filmed Edmonton, you make something out of it, give it a little local color. Edmunton deserves better.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rebecca Dalton, Marcus Rosner, Kara Duncan, Stafford Perry, Brendan Morgan and Dawn Ford

Credits: Directed by Dylan Pearce, scripted by Katy Breier and Erica Deutschman. A Freevee/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:24

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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