Summary
Even putting the potentially problematic premise aside, The Love Scam simply isn’t very good.
Look, The Love Scam isn’t very good. That’s unavoidable. I’m going to outline the premise in a moment and anyone who has seen a rom-com before in their lives will be able to tell me with a good amount of accuracy how it ends. I don’t have much positive to say about it, and there’s a fair point to be made that a central aspect of its plot is morally questionable – or worse. But I found the baby joke funny all the way through. Sue me.
It isn’t even a great joke. Umberto Riccioni Carteni’s movie, which fits the international Netflix rom-com mold like a glove, revolves around two brothers, Vito and Antone, the former of whom has a baby son named Napoleon. And Napoleon’s in a huge amount of the scenes, including – perhaps even especially – those where the presence of a baby is weird at best and hazardous at worst. This is the key recurring gag of The Love Scam, and it genuinely made me laugh quite a bit, in spite of everything else.
But we do, unfortunately, have to talk about everything else. Here’s the general idea: Vito and Antone live in an apartment building their father built that is rapidly falling apart. They are, in fact, the only remaining residents that haven’t left, determined to cling to the building and its attached restaurant despite a gentrification scheme that threatens to knock it down and a considerable debt that leaves them very few ways of dealing with it.
The debt, accrued by Antone and the brothers’ friend Salvatore, is owed to De Leonardi, whose company, as part of a project dreamed up by his daughter Marina and son-in-law Federico, stands to benefit from the construction of a hotel in the place of Naples’ ugliest edifice. Antone’s scheme to pay off the debt is to have Vito pose as a wealthy suitor to con philanthropic Marina into donating some of her vast wealth to a “worthy” cause.
To this end, with help from Marina’s stolen phone, the brothers come up with a complex scheme to learn everything they can about Marina in order to better stalk and woo her, which is where things admittedly get a bit questionable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to go overboard. Vito’s “stalking” is played for laughs and openly called out as such, but the fact he’s ultimately successful in earning Marina’s affections by locking her in an elevator with him and gatecrashing her yoga class and such is, to be fair, less than ideal.
But the bigger problem it’s that it’s just a played-out trope. We’ve seen rom-coms in which the leads meet under false pretenses, fall for each other, discover the truth, and then come together again more times than it’s possible to count, and The Love Scam doesn’t offer – doesn’t seem interested in even considering, as it happens – anything different within that formula.
And it can’t seem to decide how it feels about its characters, either – or, perhaps more importantly, how we’re supposed to feel about them. The early portions explicitly cast Vito and Antone as the “good” guys because the person they’re trying to swindle represents the very worst kind of exploitative capitalism, but it’s a key component of Marina’s character that she’s not like Federico and her father, so what are we to do with that? She’s also depicted as a woman of talent and intelligence who somehow also falls for several of the most obvious ruses ever conceived.
There’s a case to be made that The Love Scam doesn’t properly come alive until the final 20 minutes or so, which is after a lot of the cliched stuff has run its course. Free from the shackles of that derivative structure, the script – from Caterina Salvadori and Cira Zecca – feels looser, more energetic, and less morally ambiguous. But it’s too little too late to salvage such a predictable and familiar-feeling movie.
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