'My Life in Ruins' (PG-13):(out of four)

As an American tour guide in Athens, Greece, Georgia is looking for the "kefi," or spark she's lost in life. As Nia Vardalos, the actress is looking for another Olympic win like she had with "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Georgia may find her mojo in this movie, but sadly Vardalos doesn't in the followup to her 2002 film.

"My Life in Ruins," unlike "Wedding," wasn't written by Vardalos but by writer Mike Reiss, a television sitcom veteran whose credits include "The Simpsons," "It's Garry Shandling's Show" and "The Critic." Vardalos added some of her own icing on the screenplay cake, but the road to this movie's ruin is that it's peppered with sitcom-type humor that doesn't often play in a big screen setting.

Her character is a professor who has moved to Greece to teach at a university but can't find work. To hold her over, she uses her history skills to be a tour bus guide for visitors thinking she'll be able to impart her love for the ancient ruins on her guests. They merely want to eat ice cream and spend their euros on souvenirs, which puts the intellectual Georgia at odds with her low-end bus riders.

Georgia, of course, is giving the tour to a one-dimensional bus full of Group B losers. This is what is used to create drama. The Group A tour bus has the fun crowd with a very suave tour bus guide who plies his guests with on-board refreshments. They also have the more modern bus with air conditioning, and the luxury accommodations, while Georgia's group gets stuck at the one-elevator trash hotel.

The plot plods along a rocky road as Georgia leads her charges to some of the city's great treasures only to find that the crass Americans; the bickering Brits; the Aussies who drink Foster's and speak in an unintelligible language; the libidinous Latin divorcees; the kleptomaniac senior citizen and her slow-moving husband; and the funny guy widower, (Richard Dreyfuss in waste of his talents role) who have no interest in her stories.

Then there's the bearded bus driver who looks like a cave man and never speaks. He's given a dreadful name Poupi Kakas (Alexis Georgoulis), which emits an elementary school chuckle amidst the tour bus group and the moviegoing audience. In true Hollywood style, he shaves his beard and turns into Adonis. He also knows how to conjure

Georgia's hidden Aphrodite when she stumbles upon him playing classical guitar, a strategically placed bottle of wine and fresh apples, on an ever-so-perfect blanket by a body of water.

Georgia ends up finding her kefi through this group of unlikely friends, misfits she meets on a tour bus, and the rest as they say is ancient Greek history.