All Roads Lead to Rome makes it intentions clear pretty early on. Like the title suggests, the destination for these stories is already set, the movie establishing in its early moments pretty much where these characters are headed, both geographically and narratively. This should not be a problem, since it’s always about the journey and not the destination. The problem is that the movie doesn’t provide much of a journey, either.
Recently divorced Maggie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has brought her rebellious teenage daughter Summer (Rosie Day) to a Tuscan village she visited twenty years ago. There, she reconnects with Luca (Raoul Bova), with whom she'd had a brief fling all those years ago. Maggie is trying to keep Summer out of trouble, but at the very first chance she gets, Summer steals a car and runs away. With Summer is Luca's mother Carmen (Claudia Cardinale), who wants to go to Rome to reunite with an old love. While Summer and Carmen go on a misadventure through the Italian countryside, Maggie and Luca reignite old feelings while chasing after them.
The movie mostly busies itself with its chase. It isn’t a very good chase, because there isn’t any real tension in it. Maggie and Luca are hardly ever in range of their prey, so there is no urgency to any of it. This should afford the movie time to build its characters, but it doesn’t really do that. It mainly delivers one silly caper after another, much of it merely a means to delay the resolution. And that resolution falls flat, because the movie doesn’t really spend enough time building something between these characters.
The movie goes a bit too far in depicting Summer’s foolish teenage rebellion. She wants to go back home so that she can take the rap for her boyfriend, who was caught with five kilos of marijuana. The movie wants to make it out like Summer is just a good kid who’s fallen in with a bad crowd, but it never invests enough in her character to make it seem like she’s anything more than a bad egg. Later in the movie, the film becomes about trying to keep Summer out of prison, and it doesn’t really feel like she deserves to go free.
The film benefits from the natural beauty of the Tuscan countryside, but because the chase takes priority, there isn’t a whole lot of time to take it in. The movie just isn’t taking its own advice. Sarah Jessica Parker looks exhausted in this role, the actress showing little of the spark that she used to bring to her work. Rosie Day is unable to make Summer a sympathetic character, even in the back bits when she’s supposed to have learned her lesson. Claudia Cardinale is probably the best thing about this film, the actress lending the film some much-needed gravity.
All Roads Lead to Rome is tedious stuff. It is low-stakes fluff that telegraphs its ending within the first fifteen minutes, and just pads out the runtime until it can get to the appropriate resolution point. The film spends too much time on antics, and keeps its characters from just dealing directly with their conflicts. It all just builds to anticlimax, the characters having gone through all that nonsense for a phone call or a quick unraveling of a misunderstanding. Inexplicably, the movie doesn’t even earn these very minor moments of triumph.
My Rating:
