Imagine you’re an average American guy, minding your own business on a train across Europe when the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen tells you that she wants you to come with her. If you’re a normal dude, you’re at least going to be intrigued and give her a chance to talk further.
And if you’re the math teacher played by Johnny Depp in the new film “The Tourist,” you’re going to give her a chance to decide pretty darn quickly that whatever plans you have made for yourself are going to pale in comparison to whatever this lady – played by Angelina Jolie – could possibly want to do with you. You only live once, right?
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That sense of playful intrigue is at the core of the new film “The Tourist,” which brings two of Hollywood’s most unique stars together for the first time ever onscreen. A tale of double-crosses, mistaken identities and adventurous espionage set against some of the world’s most glamorous locations, “The Tourist” is a high-gloss attempt to bring back the ample and timeless charms of the light-hearted thrillers like “To Catch a Thief” and “Charade” that Cary Grant built a career on in the 1950s and ’60s and which no one has really attempted to make since.
The good news is that the actors are sometimes fun to watch. The bad news is that very fact: they’re sometimes entertaining, a problem that stems from the fact that the plot drags for a near-deadly 45 minutes at the start before finally catching fire and crafting a satisfying second half.
Perhaps what makes the difference to a Christian audience is the fact that Depp, Jolie and the filmmakers – led by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in his American debut – have resolutely turned out a film with light-hearted action rather than graphic violence, as well as no sex and only one well-placed profanity that works humorously in the context of its scene while serving as a reminder that everyone involved is crafting a really clean piece of entertainment.
In “The Tourist,” Jolie plays a woman named Elise who is caught up in an elaborate cat and mouse plot to find her mysterious lover, a swindler who’s an elusive and ultra-rich playboy, who owes nearly $750 million in taxes to the British government and also has a criminal coterie out to kill him as well for double-crossing them out of $2 billion.
Elise’s lover has passed her a note telling her to find a stranger traveling on a Venice-bound train that matches his own general appearance. The idea is to make the police and mobsters think that this other man is in fact the swindler, leaving him to be captured or killed while Elise and her actual lover can run away scot-free, happily ever after. Depp, naturally, is the man she selects to be her lover’s doppelganger, but as the two dash across Venice with cops and criminals behind them, she comes to realize she can’t leave him hung out to dry, creating a whole new set of complications.
This all may sound like fun, and for decent stretches of the film’s second half, it is. But the first half of the film is deadly dull as our allegedly dynamic duo of stars waste their energy and charisma and the audience’s patience on incessant talking rather than diving into the plot twists. It’s a real shame that the first Hollywood film in seemingly ages that tries to bring back the classic charms of Cary Grant’s classy and funny thrillers with Alfred Hitchcock – think “To Catch A Thief” – pays so much attention to surface and not nearly enough to building a solid foundation.
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