Monte Carlo (2011)

Monte Carlo arrives with the modest ambition of a summer postcard and the moral compass of a duty-free catalogue. Three young women from Texas, one of them mistaken for a British heiress, are whisked from a disappointing Paris tour into a Monaco suite paid for by someone else's trust fund. The film is built on female friendship and a female ensemble, and it treats both as a given rather than a cause. Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester, and Katie Cassidy carry the thing capably. The cast around them is otherwise a wall of white European wealth, and nobody in the script seems to notice or care, which is its own kind of statement, though probably not an intentional one.

Where the film gestures toward progressive feeling, it does so gently and then returns to the couture. Emma declines a marriage proposal, then declines a prince who is rude to waitresses, and the picture concludes that self-respect outranks social status. This arrives in the final minutes with the solemnity of a fortune cookie. The film spends two hours ogling yachts, Bulgari necklaces, and hotel suites, then asks us to admire the righteous soul beneath the surface. Vulture flagged the contradiction at the time. The contradiction has not aged into depth.

On the ledger of specific modern markers, most columns sit empty. No queer characters, no racial themes, no climate anxiety, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent representation, no historical revisionism. What remains is a mild sermon about being true to yourself, preached at a volume that would not wake a sleeping child. It is a harmless, pretty, forgettable film, and it knows precisely how little it wants to say.