Like Spaghetti sauce made without seasoning or love, Nonnas is inoffensively bland. Netflix’s new original goes through the motions, telling a heartwarming and passionate true story in a way that lacks any real heart or passion.
Listen - this is a cute story. A small Italian restaurant where all of the food is cooked by real Nonnas, rather than trained chefs. It’s really sweet, actually, but it’s not grounds for a feature-length movie. This is like a ten minute fluff piece your local station covers on a slow news day. There’s barely enough narrative meat here for an appetizer, let alone a full course, and Nonna’s clocks in at a whopping hour and 51 minutes. It goes through the standard beats you’d expect from this kind of movie, adding a dash of embellishment here and there to spice things up. It’s all just too predicable though, and maybe if the individual ingredients had a little more flavour, the end result would be less forgettable.
Vince Vaughn plays the restaurant’s founder, and while he brings a few moments of his trademark fast-talking charm, it often feels like he’s coasting. He hits his marks and delivers his lines, but there’s no real spark, no meatball-sized gusto behind the performance. It’s the acting equivalent of microwaving leftover lasagna - it technically works, but it’s missing the magic. The titular Nonnas, played by veteran actresses like Susan Sarandon and Lorraine Bracco, provide a little more heart and amusement. Do they play up the Italian stereotypes? You bet they do (The movie can’t go five minutes without a “mama mia!” moment), but they all work quite well together.
Nonnas is well-intentioned, but I’ve seen Olive Garden commercials with more heart and warmth than this. It’s a sweet little true story about a restaurant with a unique gimmick, but like me on my fifth plate at endless pasta, it’s a little bloated.
2.5/5
Review by: Benjamin Garrett