It seems like a good idea on paper. Take the biggest male and female box office draws in the world (Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie) and put them in a highly popular genre (spy thriller), chuck in a touch of romance and have your stars play to type.
Your movie can't possibly fail can it? Well if it's The Tourist, then yes, you can right royally fuck it up.
It's an intriguing premise as the CIA stalk, track and trace the slinky Ms Jolie in order to find plot macguffin, arch criminal and thief Alexander Pearce. In order to throw the rozzers off the trail Jolie is instructed to by Pearce to find someone that looks like him and get the police to follow him instead, causing the necessary distraction for her to slip away. It's you classic case of Hitchcockian mistaken identity as Depp is chased by bad guys and good guys much to his bewilderment.
The Tourist is certainly a classy film with gorgeous locations, ravishing, lush, old fashioned photography, a melodramatic score and leisurely, romantic pacing. Depp does a toned down version of his resourceful, slightly effeminate, coward routine while Jolie vamps it up to the max as a sultry seductress, complete with poss totty English accent and blinding Scarlett lipstick. It's not a stretch for either of them. Paul Bettany sleepwalks as the intelligence agent tracking them, Timothy Dalton and Rufus Sewell turn up for some brief cameos, and Steven Berkoff is brilliantly subtle but menacing as the bad guy.
But it's written with all the subtlty of a third rate Mills & Boon novel. Corny, cringe worthy with character decisions that are completely nonsensical and a central mystery that's obvious from the start. All the pieces are present and correct for a strong movie but it's built on a foundation of irredeemable corny shite.
No comments:
Post a Comment