Vardalos and Dreyfuss save "Ruins"

Georgia (Nia Vardalos) is a Greek American tour guide, who leads an assorted group of misfit tourists around Greece. Tourists who would rather buy a T-Shirt than learn about history. In an hysterical clash of personalities and cultures, everything seems to go wrong. Until one day when a very special tourist, Irv Gordon (Richard Dreyfuss), shows her how to have fun and take a good look at the last person she'd ever expect to find love with...her quiet and sexy Greek bus driver in My Life In Ruins.

If McDonald’s were ever to sell Greek food, it would be inauthentic, excessively caloric and made with bland and mass-produced ingredients. It would also be addictively tasty, even though you’d never admit that you actually liked it. And so we get My Life in Ruins, a McSouvlaki of a movie with a bum script and two-dimensional performances, but it so brilliantly wallops audiences with the charm stick that you leave the theater grinning anyway. “Ruins” stars the relentlessly likeable Nia Vardalos as Georgia, an American-born scholar of Greek history reduced to taking guided tours around the temples and cathedrals of her native country. Georgia finds herself at odds with the tourists — while she’s telling them about the history of the Olympics and the oracle at Delphi, they’d rather shop for souvenirs and go to the Hard Rock Café — and with the lackadaisical Greeks themselves. (She notes they invented democracy before they ruined it all by discovering the nap.) While her rival, snarky tour guide Niko (Alistair McGowan), gets an air-conditioned coach filled with polite Canadians, Georgia gets an overheated jalopy that includes boozing Australians (Simon Gleeson, Natalie O'Donnell); obnoxious Americans (Rachel Dratch, Harland Williams); sultry Spanish divorcees (Maria Botto, Maria Adanez); kooky seniors (Ralph Nossek, Bernice Stegers) and a Jokester widower (Richard Dreyfuss) with a penchant for Borscht Belt comedy, who winds up becoming Georgia’s confidant. Among others. Only Dreyfuss manages to develop his role into a dimensional, compassionate character. Irv prescribes a good old-fashioned romp in the hay for Georgia, even though she’s the last to realize that tour bus driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis) is Mr. Right Under Her Nose. As the group makes its way through the gorgeous countryside, the uptight Georgia learns to embrace the national “…and now we dance!” attitude, even discarding her itinerary to take her charges to the beach. Anyone who’s seen any movie where a Type-A American ice queen tosses her hair back and dances a jig with a muscled Mediterranean can pretty much guess everything that happens in My Life in Ruins just by looking at the poster. The pedestrian direction by Donald Petrie and José Luis Alcaine’s downright drab cinematography — first “Mamma Mia” and now this; why so many badly-shot films made in such a gorgeous country? — don’t really help matters either.

So why did I have such a good time at such a spectacularly middling movie? Nia Vardalos and Richard Dreyfuss. She’s so alive and funny here that her energetic spirit infects the rest of the movie. Mike Reiss’ screenplay does her no favors — the characters are almost offensively one-dimensional, the jokes are clunky, the situations couldn’t be more predictable — but she’s so invested in this slight bit of business that you completely buy into Georgia’s blossoming. Richard Dreyfus, who plays the widowed jokester with such class and warmth, you can almost start liking American tourists again. Almost. A decent 3  on my "Go See" scale.