100 min | PG | February 6, 2026 | Angel Studios
Kevin James does something unexpected. The movie buries it under everything else.
Kevin James plays Matt Taylor, a grieving widower who ends up in Italy, falls for a beautiful cafe owner, and finds himself. That’s the movie. Directors Charles and Daniel Kinnane want you to leave inspired. What you actually leave with is a clearer understanding of how wish-fulfillment comedies calcify into formula.
James is genuinely good here, or at least genuinely different. He strips away the slapstick persona and plays something quieter and sadder. That’s real. Nicole Grimaudo plays Gia, his love interest, and she is luminous and completely implausible as someone who would fall for this particular man. The film asks you to accept that Matt’s competition for her affection includes men who are better-looking, better-dressed, and more age-appropriate. The age gap between James and Grimaudo isn’t the problem. The problem is the film doesn’t acknowledge that it’s asking you to accept something the movie itself doesn’t believe.
Then there’s Andrea Bocelli. Not as an Easter egg. Not as a thirty-second cameo. Bocelli appears as himself and sings a duet with Matt Taylor, Kevin James’s character, a regular American guy, on what appears to be a stage. The scene exists to create a moment of transcendence. It creates a moment of bewilderment instead. The film stops dead. Whatever emotional logic the movie had built evaporates. You are no longer watching a story about a man finding himself in Italy. You are watching a promotional arrangement get dramatized.
Angel Studios has found an audience for inspirational content that other distributors won’t touch. That’s a real market. But inspiration requires earned emotion, and earned emotion requires honest filmmaking. This movie keeps asking for the feeling without doing the work. James tried. The movie didn’t.