Captain Corelli's Mandolin Review

The accent arrives before the character does. Nicolas Cage plays an Italian artillery officer stationed on Cephalonia with a vocal approximation that wanders between Rome, Queens and nowhere at all, and since the whole film rests on believing he could charm a Greek village out of its hatred, the wobble is fatal. John Madden and cinematographer John Toll make the island itself look extraordinary, all bleached stone and impossible blue water, and there is one genuinely fine performance from John Hurt as the doctor, dry and tired and alert to what occupation does to people.

Penelope Cruz is asked to do little but glower and then relent. Christian Bale, as the fisherman who goes off to fight and returns hardened, is handed the most interesting arc in the story and about eleven minutes in which to play it, so his turn toward cruelty registers as a plot requirement rather than a change in a man. Worse is the treatment of the massacre at the centre of the book, staged with a tastefulness that drains it of horror, and an ending that rewrites Louis de Bernieres into a reunion the preceding two hours have done nothing to earn.