The Tourist
Cinema Nova, 29/12/2010
Status: Behind by 3 films
After Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Wanted and Salt, AGELINA JOLIE could play a British secret agent in her sleep. The Tourist is proof of that.
Elise Ward (Jolie) is a disgraced British financial fraud agent seeing out her suspension in high Venetian style. She is closely monitored by her old boss, Acheson (PAUL BETTANY, Legion, A Beautiful Mind) in the hopes she will lead him to big financial fraud fish Alexander Pearce, who disappeared some time ago, leaving Elise heartbroken. Pearce has re-emerged, it seems, and drops instructions for Elise to pick a schmo as a diversion. That’d be Frank (JOHNNY DEPP), an American Maths teacher traveling Europe to get over his own broken heart. Elise is pushed and pulled by the invisible Pearce and she pushes and pulls Frank in turn. Regardless, they inevitably, stupidly, unconvincingly fall in love.
This is a really empty-feeling film. The plot is twisted in strange and not terribly interesting ways and the characters are so bland as to be repellent. I understand the original French film was quite good, and I can see the plot working much better with a French flavour, but for a Western film making tradition, it smacks of macho-egotism and absurd ideas about women.
We’re no strangers to bad American remakes of foreign language films, but I think this is the first bad American remake I’ve seen by a European director*. The Tourist is based on Jerome Salle’s Anthony Zimmer and directed by FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK, who won a foreign language Oscar for The Lives of Others. This is a massive departure from that film. It’s seems that Jolie isn’t the only one who can work in her sleep.
(*See Multiplex for an awesomely acerbic comic-based comment about this.)
