A little charm is meant to go a very long way in the daft and twee Greek American comedy “A Spartan Dream.”
Never quite funny but aspiring to “cute,” it serves up a little Greek history — some of it in fantasy form (NOT a “true story”) — along with Greek culture and Greek grievance in a love story that like many things about this movie, never gets off the ground.
Pete Bundic of Netflix’s “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” series stars as Brad, a college-age son of a widowed and broke Greek diner owner in New Jersey sent back to The Olde Country to sell a piece of inherited property.
But evicting Uncle George (Nikos Tsergas) and Aunt Marigo (Isadora Deli) will take guts and maybe a little “This is just business” heartlessness, as aunt and unclde have lived in the house with an orchard Brad’s late mother, George’s sister, inherited for over 26 years.
Further complicating matters is the cute Greek teen Brad’s aunt and uncle took in, Gorgo (Georgia Mesariti). Brad practices his Greek, listens to his Greek history lectures on tape and absorbs the culture he inherited but never experienced first hand.
Brad starts learning the minute he gets off the plane, waylaid by a too-helpful cabbie (Kostas Koronaios) who takes him to see the objects this “Spartan” lad’s ancestral home, Vapheio, is most famous for — the Vapheio gold cups.
It’s 1987, and Greece’s famous actress turned Minister of Culture, Melina Mercuri (Katerina Didaskalou) has gotten serious about demanding the British return the Parthenon Marbles that Britain’s Lord Elgin “bought” from the Greece-occupying Turks over 170 years before.
Brad wrestles with his responsibility to his father, his empathy for his Greek relatives and those in the flat-broke town they live in, his attraction to young Gorgo, a country in the midst of a 220 day drought and a heritage that keeps manifesting itself in halucinations and dreams of Spartans of the past.
It’s no wonder Spartan-expat Brad snaps.
Athens still owes Sparta a debt, he figures. And the way to get them to pay attention and pay up is to restart Sparta’s ancient Peloponnesian War with Athens. Do this on the verge of a Queen Elizabeth visit to Greece and it’ll make headlines and an international stink.
All Mercuri wants to do is shame the old monarch into giving back the marbles cut off from the Parthenon and displayed, for well over a century, in the British Museum.
The plot is loosely borrowed from Leonard Wibberley’s “The Mouse that Roared,” an early film hit for Peter Sellers from over sixty years ago. Start a war nobody intends to fight as a fund-raising exercise.
But there’s almost no comic pop to any of this, with few scenes and few players acting them out making a comical impression. The girl slaps the guy a few times more than he has coming. The scheming part of “plan” is underwritten and written off.
The cabbie named Roy Rogers is the most promising laugh, and he’s more of a philosopher than a comic foil.
“There is no coincidence! Gods make the puzzle. Gods solve the puzzle. And all we do is hang on!”
Didaskalou evokes a hint of the grande dame Mercuri, but sure laughs are underscripted and the direction (by Michael A. Nickles, billed as “M. Achilles” here) is flatfooted and comically tone-deaf.
Our leading man has echoes of a Colin Hanks at his most colorless, not a good thing.
Guys, getting finance to film a comedy as working vacation in Greece is the easy part. Making a comedy that plays is where the “work” comes in. “A Spartan Dream” loses too much in translation. Apparently.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Peter Bundic, Katerina Didaskalou, Georgia Mesariti, Nikos Tsergas,
Kostas Koronaios and Renos Haralambidis
Credits: Directed by M. Achilles (Michael A. Nickles), scripted by Leonidas Demas and George Demas. A Freestyle release on Amazon Prime, other streamers.
Running time: 1:37
