'Monte Carlo' = 'To Catch A Thief' + ?? It's EW Summer Movie Math!

Selena Gomez (whose new BF recently gave her a stinging case of BF*) gallivants around Europe in the company of Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy in this weekend’s Monte Carlo. Gomez plays a recent high-school graduate on vacation in France who winds up posing as a rich British heiress who she happens to look exactly like. (Quelle chance!) While there’s surprisingly little gambling involved for a film named for and set in Monte Carlo, the plot does double-down on a number of clichés borrowed from other films. Let’s break it down, shall we?

*Bieber Fever

Romantic fireworks display? Check. Fun and farce along the Riviera? Check. Missing jewelry as an important plot point? Check. In fact, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly’s picnic scene from the classic Alfred Hitchcock caper is even playing on a TV in the background at one point. Hey, it’s hard not to evoke the work of Princess Grace when you’re filming in her kingdom.

Equation so far: To Catch A Thief

Finding love on vacation! In Europe! On Vespas!

Equation so far: (To Catch A Thief + Roman Holiday)

Before they’ve conned their way into Monte Carlo’s high society, the three girls have some bad experiences sightseeing in Paris. Things don’t go as terribly as they do for the Griswold family (when do they ever?) but it’s still more than these travelers can handle.

Equation so far: (To Catch A Thief + Roman Holiday)/National Lampoon’s European Vacation

Selena Gomez pulls double duty in Monte Carlo, playing both an average gal from Texas and the snotty heiress she impersonates. The premise of identical doppelgangers from opposite ends of the class spectrum may stretch back all the way to Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, but I’d like to think that Monte Carlo went straight to the paragon of that genre, a true work of art that featured the Olsen twins as two unrelated, but completely identical, girls who decide to switch lives.

Equation so far: (To Catch A Thief + Roman Holiday)/ National Lampoon’s European Vacation
x
It Takes Two

Hilary Duff, like Selena Gomez, was once a Disney Channel star. Also like Gomez, she starred in a movie about a young girl going to Europe, getting mistaken for someone who looks exactly like her, and falling in love with a cute local boy under false pretenses. Is this a coincidence, or is it instead a brilliant simultaneous critique of the factory-farm manufacture and inherent interchangeability of Disney celebrities, literal pop-culture clones who must all eventually confront their own mass-produced nature? Probably just a coincidence.

Equation so far: (To Catch A Thief + Roman Holiday)/ National Lampoon’s European Vacation
x
(It Takes Two x The Lizzie Maguire Movie)

Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy, both from the popular CW show, co-star, but strangely it’s only Gomez who gets to play a bitchy, over-entitled socialite. Go figure.

And so our final equation is:
(To Catch A Thief + Roman Holiday)/National Lampoon’s European Vacation
x
(It Takes Two x The Lizzie Maguire Movie)
+
2(Gossip Girl)
=
Monte Carlo