MONTE CARLO – The Review

MONTE CARLO is a harmless taffy pull of a comedy starring Selena Gomez as Grace, a teenage waitress from Texas who takes the dream trip to Paris that she’s been saving for. The trip goes bad before she even leaves when, at the last minute, she finds that her new stepsister Meg (Leighton Meister) is tagging along with her and her best friend Emma (Katie Cassidy). Their Paris hotel is a dump and the trip is shaping up to be a disaster until suddenly Grace is mistaken for the snooty British heiress Cordelia (also played by Gomez), for whom she is a dead ringer. Suddenly the three are whisked off to Monte Carlo and treated like princesses in the posh world of balls, polo, and charity auctions where they become the romantic targets of handsome wealthy French boys.

MONTE CARLO is all very silly and empty, not unlike a made-for-Disney Channel movie but it’s not without its sunny charms. Selena Gomez is a decent young actress (though she looks younger than her 18 years) and her two costars have playful energy without being overbearingly cute. There are some colorful locations and pleasant video-style montages but it’s the type of trifle that’s forgotten almost as soon as it ends. It never fails to amaze me that something as essentially light and pointless as MONTE CARLO can clock in at 110 minutes in length. This is one of those movies that has difficulty sustaining any kind of comic or dramatic momentum for 90 minutes, so the final twenty minutes turns into a real endurance contest. The writers felt obligated to give Grace’s two traveling companions their own back stories (Meg can’t get over her mother’s death years earlier from cancer and Emma regrets turning down her cowboy boyfriend’s marriage proposal) and European suitors so the story becomes a bit overstuffed. I have no idea why this film aimed at tweens is even rated PG as I don’t recall so much as a single cuss word. The film sprinkles Disney-like magic on the fantasy that somewhere each of us has a perfect match, a physical doppelganger to teach and learn from but Cordelia is a rude little bitch when we meet her (there, this review is officially raunchier than the film), and an equally horrid at the end so an opportunity for that character to grow is missed. Tom Bezucha’s direction is comfortably assured, the European scenery is lovely, and the girl’s pleasant antics are kept moving along at a carefree clip. I took my target audience-age daughters to see it and they enjoyed it quite a bit so it succeeds in that goal but young girls are smarter than this movie and it wouldn’t have hurt to have made it a bit more challenging, sharp, or mature. The one thing that MONTE CARLO has going for it is that it is cute and sporadically funny. However, unless you’re an eleven year-old girl, neither of those qualities is reason enough to see the film and I really can’t recommend it for anyone outside of the target demographics.

A generous 2 1/2 of 5 Stars