'Everybody Wants To Be Italian': Love Is Never Saying ... Anything

In the eight years since he was dumped by his girlfriend, Jake (Jay Jablonski), the ardent but clueless hero of the new romantic comedy "Everybody Wants to Be Italian," has worked overtime to keep from moving on. Even the fact that Isabella (Marisa Petroro) is now a married mother of three cannot persuade her former beau to let go of the past. Undaunted, Jake continues to fruitlessly woo his ex to the combined irritation, embarrassment, and amusement of Isabella, her husband, and their children.

"You gotta get back in the game," Gianluca (John Enos III), one of Jake's two Italian co-workers at a fish market in the North End of Boston tells him. "Change your bait, get your rod back in the water." In an effort to save Jake from himself and to live vicariously through their single colleague's otherwise nonexistent love life, Gianluca and his buddy Steve (John Kapelos) persuade Jake to go on a blind date at a local Italian-American singles mixer. Marisa (Cerina Vincent), the girl with whom Gianluca and Steve hook Jake up, is a knockout, available, and interested.

Owing to a sequence of contrived miscommunications, Jake and Marisa each mistakenly believe the other is Italian and that divulging their true ancestry somehow constitutes a deal breaker. As their relationship gains emotional traction, the greater impediment to a happy ending becomes Jake's dogged refusal to give up hope on a future with Isabella, an assumption that suddenly becomes credible when his ex has an attack of third-act jealousy.

These and other scripted twists and turns, which writer-director Jason Todd Ipson weaves together in order to prevent all concerned from coming to their senses for 104 minutes, are at best convoluted, and at worst an assault on credulity.

Adding to the inadvertent unreality of it all is an insistently pulsing score that fills nearly every moment of the film with wall-to-wall generic Italianate elevator music more appropriate to a strip-mall spaghetti dinner than a dialogue-driven sentimental comedy.

This cheesy sonic wallpaper is of a piece with the cheap coincidences and random complications swarming around the characters in "Everybody Wants to be Italian." Jake, Marisa, Isabella, and everyone else are uniformly effusive about everything except the handful of conditions and circumstances keeping love from achieving full flower. The ensemble's declarations of knockabout wisdom regarding guys, gals, and amore are dispensed with a lack of subtlety so at odds with the film's patchwork of misunderstandings and refusals that it's as if everyone was hypnotized so as to ignore any readily available solutions to their problems.

The eerie inability of every character in "Everybody Wants to Be Italian" to just come out and say how they feel and what they've assumed makes the film a surprisingly tense viewing experience, suggesting that the horror and romantic comedy genres are more alike than one might otherwise think.