Venice is famous for its beauty and history; full of winding canals and waterways, the city is synonymous with romance. And chase scenes, so screw rom-coms! Have you noticed I’ve got travel and chase scenes on the brain lately? I blame it on winter cabin fever, which has prevented me from both traveling anywhere interesting in the last two months, and has stopped me from tailing other innocent motorists in the attempt to start ‘spontaneous’ high speed pursuit. Since I haven’t been out living it, I’ve been researching some of the absolute best heart pounding, fruit cart destroying (there’s always a fruit cart,) and wantonly disregarding of public property chase scenes ever. As it turns out, a lot of them are set in Venice… so let’s do the Internet equivalent of traveling to Venice, and gleefully plan all the ridiculous action movie scenes that we’re going to re-enact the second we get there.
Traveling to Venice – A Bro Date on a Hover-Gondola Full of Beer and Guns
Okay, so maybe we won’t, what with all of them costing excessive amounts of cash, requiring months of preparation by a special effects team, and would land us in jail immediately. But regardless of all those trifling facts, here are all the bad-ass Venetian movie chase scene activity dates I’d take all you men on. You steer the gondola, I’ll man the chain gun.
The modern version of the Italian Job begins with the quintessential boat chase. Let’s get suited up, kitted out, and then tear off in speed boats pursued by baddies with guns. You really can’t actually race speed boats in the canal without a) braining yourself on a bridge, cutting our epic adventures short far too early, or b) getting thrown in an Venetian jail, which in my imagination is also half underwater, or c) ruining some poor sucker’s date by washing his lady friend overboard with a rogue wave. In fairness, that would be hilarious, but we wouldn’t want an even bigger, more bad-ass boat swamping our fun, so live and let live. We can troll around for a vegetable barge to crash into spectacularly, because they are the floating fruit cart of the seas. And by ‘crash spectacularly’ I mean we can make motor noises and poke at the legumes as we meander by with our gondola poles.
Casino Royale
There’s a lot of debate over Casino Royale, but we can all bury the hatchet over enjoying the insane visuals of the sinking palazzo. We can head towards the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal, and spend the day constructing some needlessly complex conveyance to get us down to the wreckage so we can own a piece of the riches that went down with the ship…er, building. After pickpocketing tourists for their watch gears and stripping down light poles and park benches for the materials to build our underwater exploration vehicle, we’ll imagine how awesome it will be to discover James Bondian sunken ruins. Then we’ll laugh and leave the entire mess on the cobbled path for other tourists to be confused over, since that building never existed. Was it computer graphics all along, or just a product of the massive amounts of Venetian wine we’ll be consuming? I live for mystery.
We’re obviously going to have to gondola a lot- it’s Venice after all. But I don’t know if we’ll be able to pull off Martha Stewart hover crafting one with a souped up engine across St. Mark’s Square, so we might just have to make do with drinking at one of the cafés around the edge of this famous piazza. I don’t recall James Bond pounding a brew while escaping through the back canals of Venice, so we can totally say we one upped him. We should also probably call Hollywood and complain that James needs to do so, so much more drinking.
I was going to make some allusion to covering your heart, lest you lose it to the beauty of the city. Upon reflection, that wouldn’t be totally accurate, because I’m pretty sure the excitement of being where such an influential piece of film was made will awesomely tear your still-beating heart from your chest. While it will make a good story for the one of us who survives to tell everyone when we get home, I recommend we visit the Campo San Barnaba in the interest of our well being. In the movie, it was a library, curbing the excitement factor a little; in the present day, it’s a fully functioning church, and those tend to look down on heart tearing in public. These days, anyhow. We’ll cross our fingers and hope that no members of The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword show up and light it and us on fire, because that doesn’t really mesh with our overall plans, and I’m fairly certain that travel insurance doesn’t cover Holy Grail secret related death by arson.
The Tourist
I imagine that much of our Venetian bro date action extravaganza (as it will henceforth be referred to) will play out much like The Tourist. If you tried to use the movie as a guide to the city’s geography, you’d have a pretty hard time with it, as very little is spatially consistent with reality. We can book a room at the famous Hotel Danielli, when the bad guys [confused room service waiters] come for us, we’ll jump out the window and land on catch a ride to the Rialto market, which is actually half the city away. Despite having an excellent time doing all manner of important action movie activities, I doubt that we’ll find a way to fly, no matter how hard we try to make Da Vinci machines out of the expensive hotel sheets. For the end of our whirlwind trip, we’ll head out by water and hope to god Angelina Jolie goes speeding by in some sort of time warp where she still has a killer body and needs a few extra hands in her water taxi.
So, anyone want to come to Venice with me?
