An abyss of arrogance and presumption with protagonists Marco Giallini, Gian Marco Tognazzi and Giampaolo Morelli who want to steal the Mona Lisa, but the plot is unlikely
There are no words in the face of such a massacre, such a nullity, such an abyss of arrogance and presumption (why call this Once upon a time there was crime
a “film” is opinionated and presumptuous). The definition of a high school teacher when faced with the nothingness of the questioned comes to mind: Torricellian emptiness with smokes of culture, only this time not even the smokes of culture are there, just a badly recited homeland history card. Indeed, very badly. At the beginning, three years ago, there was a film with its own slender but acceptable raison d’etre, despite the plagiarism and the endless quotes: in We just have the crime, three idlers ended up in a mysterious time gap from today to 1982 and got rich by betting on the soccer results of the World Cup that they naturally knew. Except colliding with Renatino, the head of the Banda della Magliana. The idea came from a thousand other films, Rback to the future
e
It happened tomorrow
in the head, but a few jokes hit the mark and at least there was no risk of falling into nostalgic pathetism. But forgetting that success is not always a good advisor, the IIF of Lucisano decided that they had to continue to beat the road, first with a superfluous Return to crime
and now with this you don’t even know how to define, since using the word “film” risks being an outrage.
This time the time hole serves the three protagonists – Marco Giallini’s Moreno, Gian Marco Tognazzi’s Giuseppe and Giampaolo Morelli’s Claudio (who took the place of Alessandro Gassmann’s Sebastiano, I hope self-eliminated for shame) – to return in 1943 and steal the Mona Lisa, hidden in the castle of Chambord from possible German raids. Having stolen the painting as the comic drawings tell us during the opening credits (the only idea of the whole operation, the result of the need to save on production costs), the three must arrive in time to the place where the next one will open. time hole to return to today, led at a distance by Gianfranco (Massimiliano Bruno, who does not hesitate to attribute the direction and the screenplay together with Alessandro Aronadio, Andrea Bassi and Renato Sannio) and by Lorella (Giulia Bevilacqua). Of course, things do not go as they should due to Giuseppe’s proverbial clumsiness and Moreno’s ignorance and so the appointments with wormhole who should save them slip one after the other, forcing them first to ask for help from Adele (Carolina Crescentini), Moreno’s grandmother, where he will also meet his future mother when he was still a child, and then to chase the Nazis along Italy until in Naples to free the little girl who was hiding in a German military vehicle.
The fun should be in the fact that, escaping now from the Nazis, now from the fascists, now from the partisans but always with the Mona Lisa in their backpack, the quartet (the three plus Adele) first meets Pertini (Rolando Ravello) with the unfailing passion for scopone and he who does not understand why called “president”, then staged a pitiful pantomime in the castle of Crecchio with a fake royal and finally shared the residence of Campo Imperatore even with the Duce (Duccio Camerini), first depressed by the lack of gratitude of the Italians and then emboldened by a night spent in be photographed by Adele who was a portraitist by trade. Forced to resort to Claudio’s degree in historical subjects to explain to the public the events in which the four are involved, the increasingly unlikely and twisted plot involves the revived Renatino (Edoardo Leo) and the lover Sabrina (Ilenia Pastorelli) in an attack on the Nazis that overrides any revisionist fantasy, with a “left” redemption of the Banda della Magliana that adds to a directorial slovenliness that we thought we should never see again and that takes us back to the darkest moments of our film industry. So much so as to make us exclaim: Tanio Boccia is back, all is forgiven!
March 7, 2022 (change March 8, 2022 | 10:31)
© Time.News