2 stars (out of four)
Frank Tupelo (played by Johnny Depp) is an American tourist who reads spy novels. A good adventure story excites him and, like any of us, he is eager to believe an unbelievable story if it means getting caught up in some excitement for at least a little while. So when the beautiful Elise (Angelina Jolie) sits across from him on a train ride through the France, it doesn’t take long for him to get caught up in some international intrigue. By the end of the film, he becomes absorbed in the action but forgets to bring his like-minded adventure-seekers – us, the audience – with him. We sit there, willing to believe the preposterous story unfolding onscreen but the film takes advantage of our tolerance and goes from being merely unbelievable to nearly unbearable.The film begins with Elise, a beautiful woman with a high-profile boyfriend, Alexander Pearce, who is being hunted on two fronts. The British government wants him for stealing millions and a mobster (Steven Berkoff) wants him for stealing billions. A letter from Pearce instructs Elise to find a man on a train with a similar body type to his. The Brits, led by a determined agent (Paul Bettany), know that Pearce has undergone constructive surgery and can be easily thrown off the trail with a decoy.
The decoy is Frank and from here the film becomes a Hitchcockian story of mistaken identity. The problem, however, is that the entry point into that story is all wrong. Hitchcock understood that a mysterious story on its own isn’t enough to hook the audience. We have to be lured into it. By introducing us first to Elise rather than Frank, the film takes the wind out of a good premise by letting the audience in on too much too quickly.
Awful writing doesn’t help the film either. The screenplay is rushed, banking on the film’s star power to generate interest in its thinly sketched characters. For what it’s worth though, Johnny Depp works hard to make Frank’s naïve, wet behind the ears tourist a likable character. Even when Depp is delivering the clumsiest of lines, we believe his face while we cringe at the words he’s been asked to say. Depp’s performance is an honest one that reminds us why he’s a movie star. Angelina Jolie’s lips, on the other hand, remind us why she is. Her character is a stiff, uninteresting spy film stock character, the kind of bland femme fatale that the hero usually passes over for the more homely but charming heroine. No such character exists in The Tourist.
The rest of the cast fills out their roles well enough. Bettany is good as an agent desperate to crack the case and look good to his boss (played by former Bond, Timothy Dalton) and Berkoff makes a fine villain. Were the rest of the film better, their performances might have been colorful exercises in spy movie side characters. As the film is though, they only serve to take screen time away from our protagonists, who we don’t very much care about anyway.
Strange that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck helms this film, a German director whose native-language debut The Lives of Others won him a deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film. That film, a thoughtful meditation on the nature voyeurism and surveillance, presented Donnersmarck as an exciting new voice. Why he chose such a lackluster spy flick as its follow-up is beyond me, though maybe this will take some of the pressures and expectations off him when crafting his next feature.
One can’t help though but put much of the blame here on Donnersmarck. He seems uncomfortable directing the material and he either wasn’t allowed to make many of the creative decisions or simply deferred the responsibility to studio heads. The oddly trite musical score by James Newton Howard, for example, is a disaster. It alternates between thumping techno in the action scenes and sappy strings in the would-be romantic ones, successfully undermining every scene in the film.
The pacing is off too. The film takes a long time to get started and doesn’t do much once it does. When we finally reach the absurd ending, we barely care that it makes no logical sense. Fortunately for Donnersmarck, the rest of the film is bad enough that no one would want to go back for a second viewing to find all the plot holes.
A good spy film needn’t be realistic, but there is a difference between the unbelievable and the unbelievably contrived. The Tourist straddles that line and jumps head first onto the wrong side.
- Steve Avigliano, 12/17/10
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