Tim Leffel's Cheapest Destinations

The Art of Travel DVD

This past weekend I watched two movies that could have been great but weren’t. Unfortunately, one was The Art of Travel. Not to be confused with the fantastic and inspiring Art of Travel book by Alain de Botton, this movie wants to be as worth watching at The Motorcycle Diaries or The Beach, but the plot has more holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese and there’s just too much silliness for any real traveler to take it seriously. But hey, there are plenty of beautiful people and there’s lots of beautiful scenery, so at least they got the eye candy taken care of.

I’ll let you read the entry on the IMDB to get the full plot summary, but basically a high school grad walks out on his wedding and grabs the next flight out, which happens to be to Nicaragua. He eventually moves on to Panama and gets invited to spend a year chopping through the Darien Gap with a guy he just met. He falls in love with an older hottie who is along, ends up in Peru, then Bolivia. All this on Dad’s money, apparently, though he didn’t communicate with his family the whole time he was on the expedition.

There could have been profound meditations on the real art of travel and the transformation that takes place, but instead the directors seemed to feel a need to pile on and pile on outrageous plot devices to the point of incredulity. Managua comes off like a war zone, gunshots and sirens going constantly, and our hapless hero gets robbed three times in 24 hours, down to the shirt off his back. Still, he manages to get laid by two sexy Dutch girls he just met that morning upon finding his way back to his hotel on foot.

The slog through the Darien is done with a magic jeep that recovers from tumbling down a mountain and supplies that miraculously keep replinishing themselves, including gas and a year’s worth of beer. There’s always room to camp, the tents stay in great shape, and the ladies’ hair always looks lovely during this trip through the jungle. Nobody breaks any bones or gets dengue fever.

I probably could have lived with all this—it’s a Hollywood movie after all—until the star (from the TV show Malcolm in the MIddle) and his new love get to Peru. There they ride the $450 Hiram Bingham train out to Machu Picchu and then walk around the site for hours with nobody else around! Not even the guards!! Then he splits with her (after smoking a hookah in Cusco–huh?) because going to Prague would somehow means he stops traveling and he rents a Land Rover to drive around the Salt Flats of Bolivia by himself. He checks into a guesthouse and a postcard is waiting for him there. Um, okay.

The scenery is good much of the time though. So in the end when the credits roll it feels like you just ate a cake that looked really nice but didn’t taste that great. That goes for a lot of cakes I’ve sampled in Latin America actually, so maybe it’s appropriate. If you’ve got two hours to kill, you could do worse than this movie, but don’t go into it expecting something profound or believable.

There was a trailer on it for a movie called Transsiberian though that looks really interesting. From the same studio and the first I’ve heard of it, even though it’s got Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley in it.

(The other movie? It was 21, that bastardization of the acclaimed book Bringing Down the House. What, the real story of a bunch of college students taking the casinos for millions wasn’t compelling enough on its own? What a waste of talent and film.)