The problem is that the novel is about a lot more than this, and the story suffers in the translation.
Comment
08/17/01
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)
29
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:114
Fresh:33
Rotten:81
Average Rating:4.4/10
Consensus: The cinematography is gorgeous, but the movie plays it fast and loose with history and the novel it was adapted from. Mostly, the movie fails because the romance between the leads strains credulity and the story is largely uninvolving.
Runtime: 2 hrs 9 mins
Genre: Dramas
US Box Office: $25,261,240
Synopsis: Academy Award (R) winner Nicolas Cage (City of Angels) and Penelope Cruz (All About My Mother) star in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, an epic tale about the enduring hope of love and the devastating... [More]
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Penélope Cruz, Christian Bale, John Hurt
Director: John Madden
Reviews for Captain Corelli's Mandolin
A phlegmatic, middlebrow romantic drama so stodgy that even the goats look bored.
08/17/01
Top CriticIt never seems real and authentic. It is always a movie, sometimes charming, sometimes a paint-by-numbers piece with really pretty images.
08/17/01
The movie is dramatically slack and uninvolving.
08/17/01
Captain Corelli's Mandolin gets things about half right.
08/17/01
The real star is Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll, who captures the beauty of the islands better than any travel agent could.
08/17/01
Top CriticA sprawling saga of the World War II era, Captain Corelli's Mandolin has romance, conflict, violence. What it lacks is economy, subtlety and, above all, irony.
08/17/01
Cruz probably doesn't have more than 40 lines of dialogue in the entire film, but she makes every word, every gesture, every held-back tear matter.
08/17/01
If you overlook the revisionist version of history it presents, the hilariously inept attempts to portray realistic accents and a lack of romantic chemistry between the two leads, Captain Corelli's Mandolin isn't a bad little movie.
08/17/01
Utterly uninvolving when it's not just laughably dreadful.
08/17/01
de Bernieres' book has been bastardized, softened into something more palatable for audiences to handle and thus drained of its energy.
08/17/01
Beautifully filmed and smartly told, Mandolin delights with unexpected plot twists and polished performances from John Hurt as the curmudgeonly pop and Christian Bale as the jilted fiance.
08/17/01
What we get is kind of a condensed version of some of the sights and sounds of the novel, without the heart, the spirit and the juicy detail.
08/17/01
Top CriticThe adapters of Louis de Bernieres' complicated and troubling novel Corelli's Mandolin have cut away most of what made the book unique.
08/17/01
Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a classic case of a mainstream Hollywood movie biting off more history than it can chew.
08/17/01
Captain Corelli's Mandolin doesn't so much strike a lot of sour notes as fail to strike the right ones.
08/17/01
The film flirts with greatness, but it settles instead on being something that is very good.
08/17/01
In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, war is hell -- but it need not get in the way of a relaxing Mediterranean vacation.
08/17/01
There are three ingredients missing here: character, character, and character.
08/16/01
Cage sounds like an Italian waiter in a "Monty Python" sketch.
08/16/01
Latest News for Captain Corelli's Mandolin
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April 19, 2005:
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June 05, 2001:
Initial test screenings failed to induce awe. Universal, hoping for an Oscar contender, bumped the film from its spring release so that Madden could recut it. 
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