Little Italy

An often excruciatingly irrelevant piece of work, Little Italy details the intense rivalry between two side-by-side pizza joints in Toronto – with the movie following the grown-up children of both sides (Hayden Christensen’s Leo Campo and Emma Roberts’ Nikki Angioli) as they find themselves falling for one another. Filmmaker Donald Petrie, working from a script by Steve Galluccio and Vinay Virmani, delivers a sluggish narrative that traffics heavily in tired, unfunny stereotypes, as virtually every element within the proceedings is dripping with eye-rollingly hoary conventions that grow more and more aggravating as time progresses – with, especially, the admittedly talented supporting cast (which includes Alyssa Milano, Andrea Martin, and Danny Aiello) trapped within the confines of unreasonably over-the-top and one-dimensional cliches. (It’s worth noting, as well, that the movie’s two Indian characters are painted with just as offensively broad a brush as their Italian costars.) And although Christensen and Roberts are relatively charming within their respective roles, Little Italy‘s almost total dearth of positive attributes effectively negates its few affable elements – with the hopelessly uninvolving atmosphere compounded by a continuing emphasis on some of the worst and most hackneyed jokes one could imagine (eg a flirty cop pats down/sexually assaults Christensen’s confused character). The endless 104 minute running time ensures that the picture runs out of steam long before it arrives at its ludicrous race-to-the-airport, feel-good conclusion (ie it hasn’t even remotely earned this, not even a little bit), and it is, in the end, impossible not to wonder to which demographic Little Italy has been designed to appeal (ie seemingly young teenagers, no doubt, yet the script is rife with R-rated bits of sexual innuendo).

* out of ****