Danny J. Boyle

(On TV, October 2022) Here we go again: another made-for-TV romantic comedy revolving around food, this time all about Chicago-style pizza. (Don’t worry: New York-style is briefly discussed and diplomatically called something different than Chicago-style.)  In A Slice of Chicago Romance, the new owner of a pizzeria, following the retirement of her parents, unites with the sexy son of her family’s historical rivals to take on a chain that just opened in their neighbourhood. Everyone understands where this is going, but the trick is whether the film, shot in Atlanta, can actually be fun along the way. It gets… a middling grade. It’s not really surprising if the plot relies on an outrageous simplification of possible issues (she has the sauce, he has the crust—whoah there), borderline-delusional characters (such as the protagonist thinking that transforming a traditional neighbourhood pizzeria into a gastropub is a good idea!), and a narrative approach that ensures you can zone out for minutes at a time without missing much. The integral litany about that kind of movie’s limitations is to be found here: second- or third-grade actors (not many of them as ethnic-Italian as they’re supposed to be), a bland heroine, brute-force dialogue, terrible staging, unconvincing sets, and utilitarian direction from Danny J. Boyle. I’m not blaming anyone here: they’re delivering a budget product under very specific constraints for a target audience that can’t (or won’t) distinguish between food-as-fuel and food-as-art, or rather film-as-filler and film-as-art. A Slice of Chicago Romance is watchable, barely, and hardly worth getting animated about.