The Tourist

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where a movie like The Tourist goes wrong.  All the ingredients add up: a great foreign director with a unique eye for the craft, an exotic setting, an on-paper witty script by two Oscar winners, and the two most famous actors currently working in movies.  What could go wrong?

Well, you can start with the fact that Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp look and act like they are phoning this movie in (Depp particularly; he just looks… stale).  Also, when a 103 minute film feels double that long, it isn’t very conducive to amiable results.

You’ve heard a variation of this plot a dozen times (maybe even this year): a sultry, elusive spy-type woman tricks an aimless American man into falling for her, so the woman can throw off the guys in dark suits tailing her every move.  Eh.  Of course people are not who they seem, curtains are pulled back, “twists” are introduced, etc etc.

Maybe this sounds intriguing to you, I don’t know.  It did to me (kind of), mostly because the film is directed by Florian Henckel von Dennersmarck who won an Oscar for directing the very brilliant The Lives of Others in 2006.  Intriguing though it may sound, The Tourist is a muddled, boring mess. 

Honestly, you can’t save your film by revealing plot “twists” that anyone with an IQ over 50 figured out five minutes into the movie.  No offense to those of you that didn’t, but come on, once you found out what those “twists" were, you rolled your eyes, admit it. D