Chasing Liberty (2004)

Chasing Liberty arrives in 2004 as a Warner Bros. teen romance with Mandy Moore as Anna Foster, the President's daughter, who slips her Secret Service detail in Prague and drifts through Venice, Berlin and the Austrian countryside with a handsome stranger who is, of course, an agent in disguise. The film is a transparent restaging of Roman Holiday, and its makers knew it. Andy Cadiff directs with the efficiency of a man assembling furniture from a familiar diagram. It grossed twelve million against a twenty-three million dollar budget, which is the market's way of observing that the diagram had been used before.

A faint current of female autonomy runs through the premise. Anna chafes at her handlers, demands to be treated as an adult, and briefly experiences the world unsupervised. That current is capped almost immediately. The story resolves through romance, a father's blessing, and a motorbike ride into a London evening. The film is not arguing a thesis about women and power. It is arguing that daughters should be permitted a little air before settling down. Elsewhere the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is white to a degree that would embarrass a stock photo library, with a few non-white performers in the margins and no evident interest in altering that arrangement. Racial themes, queer themes, climate anxieties, class critique, body politics, neurodivergence: none of it appears. The film's Europe is a backdrop of gondolas and opera, not a place with ideas.

What remains is a picture with no sermon in it. It lectures no one. It is formulaic comfort food, as the critics of the day agreed, and there is a modest integrity in that. We are left to score it as we would score a plain biscuit: honestly, and without much appetite.